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COFflllGHT DEPOSm 



FACING THE 
HINDENBURG LINE 

Personal Observations at the Fronts 

and in the Gamps of the British, 

French, Americans, and 

Italians, during the 

Campaigns of 1917 

BY 

BURRIS M JENKINS 

Author of ♦ 

** The Man on the Street, " etc. 




NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

LONDON AND EDINBURGH 



Copyright, 191 7, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



32640 
.■^43 



New York :' "" ' 1 58 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
London : 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh : 100 Princes Street 



m 151918 
©CI.A481409 



a*' 



r 



To 

My Son in Aviation 



PREFACE 

IN the double capacity of war correspondent 
and Y. M. C. A. lecturer, I had unusual 
opportunities of seeing the war, on all 
the fronts of western Europe, as it was in 
191 7. As a correspondent, I could go where, 
as a Y. M. C. A. man, I could not; and as a 
Y. M. C. A. worker my duty called me where 
as a newspaper man I could not have gone. 
The observations of most military men are 
confined to their own particular sector or 
sphere. My commission was a roving one. 

I do not say these things to boast. No man 
can come into close contact with this world 
misfortune and, if he have any imagination or 
any soul, come away with egoism accentuated. 
When many of the choicest men of earth: 
artists, scholars, musicians, men of letters, are 
dying — common soldiers in trenches, — one can 
only feel the insignificance of self. I say these 
things, then, only to give confidence in the 
statements made, when, in these days, one can- 
not always be sure what to believe. I have 
written down what I saw and heard. 

B. A. J. 
Kansas City, Mo. 

5 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAOa 

I. Dodging the Submarine 9 

II. The Folkestone Air-raid... 17 

III. Tommy Atkins in an Audi- 

ence 23 

IV. The British Front in France 33 

V. Great Britain Just Begin- 

ning TO Fight 43 

VI. "Gentlemen, Once More 

Unto the Breach." 53 

VII. The British Officer 63 

VIII. Tommy Atkins Up to Date.. 76 
IX. Two Undecorated Heroes . . 89 
X. The British Are Brave in 

Sorrow 100 

XI. Verdun is Mighty 112 

XII. Champagne and Camouflage 123 

XIII. The Red Triangle of War. . . 131 

XIV. With the Poilu and His Offi- 

cer 141 

XV. The Airman 1 53 

XVI. Up in a Biplane 164 

XVII. Our Army Overseas 177 

7 



8 Contents 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XVIII. Americans Sitting in the 

Shadow 189 

XIX. American Boys and French 

Chasseurs 200 

XX. Americans Must Learn the 

Game 210 

XXI. The Spectacular Italian 

Front 223 

XXII. The Italian Commando Su- 
premo 233 

XXill. The Indefatigable Italian.. 244 



DODGING THE SUBMARINE 

THE Trans- Atlantic journey in submersi- 
ble days differs from one in ordinary 
times mainly, though not entirely, in 
psychology. Your friends at the port of sail- 
ing — if you are unfortunate enough to have 
any — shake their heads and look at you com- 
miseratingly as if you had double pneumonia 
or were in the last stages of typhoid, tubercu- 
losis or insanity. They tell you how they ad- 
vised So-and-so, who came all the way from 
Denver or Dodge City, that he ought to go 
back home and not sail; and he did so. Then 
all the way across the submarine keeps bob- 
bing up from beneath the surface of — con- 
versation and exploding either in shudders or 
in laughter. 

There are, however, some concrete re- 
minders that these are not the placid seas of 
peace. For example, your first glimpse of 
the slender liner reveals not the former beauti- 
ful contrast between black hull, red funnels 
and white upper works, but one dead level of 

9 



10 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

lead colored war paint. There is a small gun 
forward and a larger one aft. Notices are 
on the bulletin boards instructing you how to 
comport yourself "in case it becomes neces- 
sary to abandon ship" — delicate euphemism! 
Lifebelts are brazenly obtrusive; and the 
passenger list is cut up into groups and as- 
signed to various lifeboats. A few days out 
to sea and there is a drill, in which each one 
arrays himself in his cork necklace and water- 
proof coat and scrambles up to the upper deck 
to assemble with his grotesque mates beside 
his boat, feeling uncommonly corpulent and 
sheepish. 

There are eight or ten passengers equipped 
with new fangled rubber suits, filled under 
the arms and about the body with some sub- 
stance lighter than cork, witlL compartments 
for food, water bottle, alarm whistle and all 
the conveniences of a solitary journey in the 
sea, except furnaces and propeller. An obese 
woman of fifty in one of these looks like 
a huge bifurcated tadpole, and walks, with 
her leaden soles, like a thousand of brick. 
There is merriment at her expense, but she 
looks desperately determined and superior. 
She has paid between sixty and one hundred 
dollars for her marine costume, and all that 
she hath will she give in exchange for her 



Dodging the Submarine 11 

life. What a pity if she does not get an op- 
portunity to use her bathing suit! There is 
only one defect about these elaborate con- 
trivances, and that is that the driving spray 
on the crests of the waves is what drowns one, 
after all. The rest of us, in envy, perhaps, 
look upon the chosen ten and mutter the 
Calvinistic sentiment: "A man who is bom 
to be hanged is not going to be drowned." 

Strangely enough the most real source of 
danger is ignored by all the passengers, how- 
ever sensible of it are the captain and his 
crew, and that is the running through the 
nights without "riding lights." Twenty knots 
an hour we go plunging forward into the 
blackness, when any moment we may crash 
into some other craft, of which there are 
thousands on the seas. The ocean is not so 
big a place after all. Fancy driving a motor 
car along a country road at like speed without 
headlights! To be sure the cases are not 
parallel, although fairly so. It is strange that 
there are not more collisions, but old sailors 
predict that there will be. I have heard of 
only one, when two transports in the Mediter- 
ranean came together. We pass other ships 
daily, sometimes several in a day, but at 
night not a glim is shown either by us or 
by our neighbors. Our windows and ports 



12 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

are covered with sheetiron screens. The last 
two or three nights we are forbidden to light 
cigars or cigarettes on deck. At all times the 
showing of an electric flashlight is "defendu" 
One evening I stepped out into the Stygian 
darkness on the promenade deck and stood 
gazing or trying to gaze into the blackness, 
when bump! I thought a submarine had hit 
me on the chin! ^'Pardon, Monsieur!" and 
I could tell by the clatter of the wooden shoes 
upon the deck that a sailor had unconsciously 
assaulted me. 

Many of the nights some passengers, life 
preservers on them or beside them, spent the 
livelong night in their steamer chairs upon 
the deck. They usually declared that they 
desired the fresh air — the rooms are so stuffy, 
don't you know. After all, most sane people 
refuse to forego pajamas and the delightful 
early morning salt bath, and cold shower, as 
in peace times. A few of us realized that 
we had ahead of us a shorter channel voyage 
more dangerous than the Atlantic; and the 
wise ambulance drivers on board knew that 
at times a single mile at the French front 
would prove far more hazardous from shells 
than the whole ten days at sea from sub- 
marines. Nevertheless, there was a sigh of 
relief from the whole two hundred and thirty- 
seven of us when we had made the harbor 



Dodging the Submarine 13 

mouth and the police and customs officials came 
aboard. These funtionaries never appeared so 
welcome before. 

There was a pair of French private soldiers 
in the second cabin, one of them young and 
smooth faced, like an American, the bronze 
cross of war upon his breast. These men came 
swinging aboard, in their tourquoise-blue uni- 
forms, their kits on their shoulders, crying 
farewells, shouting Vivas and all but singing 
La Marseillaise. They had been ^'blesses" 
wounded reservists, and were American 
citizens. 

There was a young woman, a trained nurse, 
one would guess, gay, apparently thoughtless, 
always promenading. Guess again, and you 
will miss it again. She is at the head of one 
of the largest international relief agencies, and 
is admitted to every front. 

There was a professor in the Harvard Medi- 
cal Faculty. He is engaged in an experiment 
of incalculable value. He seeks to overcome 
shock, whatever that is. He nor any other 
surgeon will define it. He must get to a man 
within a few minutes after the soldier is hit ; so 
he must sit in the front trenches under shell 
fire, waiting his opportunities. Like all other 
occupants of these trenches, he declares that 
the monotony is the deadly thing. His method 
is extremely simple when he explains it. It is 



14 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

a wonder nobody ever thought of it before ; but 
that is to be said of all great inventions and dis- 
coveries. 

There was the impressario of the greatest 
grand opera company in America. There was 
the French art dealer, who has sold some of 
the world's greatest treasures to American 
millionaires. There was the Italian consul 
general to a great city in Canada, who had 
been called home to take his place in the war 
office, who uttered to me this well put maxim : 
"Egotism in a man is bad; in a nation, it is 
necessary." There was the French manufac- 
turer of automobiles and airplanes, who had 
been to America purchasing supplies. He and 
his pretty little wife were inseparable com- 
panions and evidently had been deeply in love 
with each other these twenty years. 

There was a big husky western American 
surgeon on his way as a pioneer to study 
hospital administration at the front, against 
the arrival of American troops. There were 
several young ambulance men, in their uni- 
forms of the American Red Cross, in France, 
with the little fore-and-aft fatigue caps worn 
alike by Tommies and poilus. 

To me, however, the most striking figure 
on board was the young American in the Red 
Cross uniform, with the Medaille Militaire 
and the Croix de Guerre both upon his breast 



Dodging the Submarine 15 

and the two red scars upon his forehead and 
the hole in his cheek. Handsome? Of 
course he is handsome, with patrician face, 
clear, brown eye, high color and little mus- 
tache and the lithe figure of an Indian. Ten 
months at the front; then one day a shell; 
given up to die, or worse; his father sum- 
moned across the sea by a cable which stated 
that his son, if he survived at all, must be 
paral)rtic, or totally blind, or insane ; but home 
for six months and back now to have certain 
pieces of steel taken out of forehead and face 
bones; then, if he survives, into the aviation 
corps, where the first plane he destroys will 
bring him, he thinks, the Legion d'Honneur, 
Let him tell the story in his own words, as 
he told it so modestly to me: 

"It was about eight miles northwest of 
Verdun, last September. The Bosches knew 
of our motor lorries bringing supplies into the 
village and kept their guns trained on a cer- 
tain corner. When they heard a motor coming 
they dropped a shell at that corner. They 
heard our ambulance and dropped one on us. 
It was a hundred to one shot and we got the 
hundredth. Kelly was killed. I did not lose 
consciousness, but was blinded and deafened. 
One eardrum is gone. See, I can stop this 
side of my nose and blow out of my ear. I 
was afraid to shout, as the Germans weren't 



16 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

three hundred yards away. I called Kelly, 
but he did not reply. Then I set out to crawl. 
I bumped into barbed wire and struck my 
shoulder, drew back and bumped again. At 
last I yelled and they turned a machine gun 
on me, but I lay fiat and yelled some more. 
Then two Frenchmen from the poste de secours 
came out and got me. That's all." 

They sighted a floating mine one day from 
the bridge, when we were nearing land. The 
usual method is to fire upon any strange cask, 
and, if it is a mine, explode it; but this mine 
was seen so early in the morning that our 
gallant French captain refused to disturb his 
passengers with a shot. When I told this 
afterwards to an English sergeant, he merely 
remarked: "Well, I'll be damned!" Our 
captain, however, sent his pilot-boat back to 
shoot the mine. 

Our return across the Atlantic, from a port 
in England, was singularly fortunate. An 
American rear-admiral and his staff were 
upon our ship, returning from a mission 
abroad. Five destroyers, therefore, accom- 
panied us the first three hundred and fifty 
miles; then three dropped back, and two re- 
mained with us until we were seven hundred 
and fifty miles out and quite beyond the 
danger line. 



II 

THE FOLKESTONE AIR-RAID 

WHEN I rushed out of our house by 
the seaside I found crowds gazing 
upward in the direction of the sun. 
I could see nothing for the glare, neither ap- 
parently could others. 

Suddenly two little girls cried: "There they 
are!" Then I saw them, two airplanes, not 
Zeppelins, emerging from the disc of the sun 
almost overhead. Then four more, or five, 
in a line; and others, all like bright silver in- 
sects hovering against the blue of the sky. 
The heavens seemed full of them. There 
were about a score in all and we were charmed 
with the beauty of the sight. I am sure few 
of us thought seriously of danger. 

Then the air was split by the whistle and 
rush of the first bomb, which sounded like 
the shrill siren of a car. This was followed 
at once by a detonation that shook the earth. 
I heard nobody shriek, weep, or cry aloud. 
The people were marvelously controlled. 

I glanced in the direction of the shell-burst, 

17 



18 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

lOO yards away, and the debris was still going 
up like a column of smoke. Then came two 
more strokes, apparently in the same spot. 
Then three other bombs fell. I afterwards 
found the missiles wrecked the Osmond hotel 
and wounded our motor driver. 

Then another bomb demolished the manor 
house by the sea. Two others fell in the 
water behind me and the gravel and mud and 
water spouted up in a geyser to the top of the 
cliffs where I stood. Later I learned that one 
of these shots tore off the legs of a Httle boy 
playing with his sister. The mother lay in 
a faint and the little sister, driven mad, rushed 
blindly into the water. She was rescued by 
a wounded soldier. 

Other shots fell, but I could count no 
further. They came thick and fast, like 
crackling, rolling blasts of our western light- 
ning and thunder. Nobody has reported the 
number of shells so far as I know. There 
were 200 or more casualties, nearly 100 of 
them fatalities. Anti-craft shells were now 
bursting on the fringes of the air fleet. Then 
followed in the distance the purr of the 
machine guns and we knew that our own 
planes were up in pursuit. We were later in- 
formed that three of the hostile fleet were 
brought down in the channel. 



The Folkestone Air-Raid 19 

Most people took to the cellars. Had I 
known there was a cellar handy, or that it is 
considered good form in the circumstances, I 
should have followed, for soon I found myself 
alone on the leas overlooking the sea, where 
I had gone at the first cry of "Zepps." 

It was our first time under fire and reminded 
me of a Missouri cyclone. The only draw- 
back to this comparison is that the sun was 
shining in a clear blue sky over a placid sea. 

As the bombs were crashing around us and 
houses were caving in, before I knew it I was 
humming a long- forgotten tune, doubtless 
sub-consciously associated with those old days. 
Two other men in our party independently 
testified that they also began singing softly. 

Perhaps this tendency to sing or whistle 
is a manifestation of nerves and explains why 
troops always do so when we see them em- 
barking for France; they know that next day 
they will be in the trenches — ^maybe over the 
parapet. At all events we confessed to nerves 
and fear. 

When I reached the spot where the first 
three bombs had fallen, glass strewed the 
street for a block. In the middle of the 
macadam road was a shell hole six or eight 
feet across and three deep. Here lay two 
men in uniform, who looked to me to be dead; 



20 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

there was a civilian, white-haired, who I knew 
had been killed. 

Yonder was a little girl, half her face gone, 
yonder a young woman, both feet gone. Our 
young lieutenant, a Y. M. C. A. man from 
Canada, our host of those days, himself wear- 
ing the gold stripe on his arm, which betokens 
a wound, and no longer fit for service in the 
field, was bending over the wounded. I heard 
one of the stricken soldiers moaning, now, 
"Mother, O, mother!" Yonder lay two little 
babies already covered with sacking. 

We rushed into a nearby basement, where 
they said was a wounded woman. Her hip 
was gashed. A Red Cross nurse appeared 
from nowhere. They were carrying an old 
lady, shaking with palsy, from a shell of a 
house. She was 80 years old, if a day. She 
had on bonnet and gloves. How she man- 
aged thus to array herself for departure from 
her home or to live at all in her demolished 
house is beyond me. 

Down the slope of the lower and busier 
section of the town a narrow street crowded 
with afternoon shoppers was strewn with 
scores of dead, mostly girls and women. The 
old shoemaker who had been in his little shop 
was never found. Legs and arms and heads, 
detached, were scattered about. The draper's 



The Folkestone Air-Raid 21 

shop was a mass of brick and stone and every 
girl in it was dead. 

The remarkable thing was that I heard no 
shrieking and saw no weeping nor wringing 
of hands. All faces were white; teeth were 
clenched, lips compressed, women clutched at 
their garments or spasmodically smote their 
breasts. But not a moan nor a loud word 
escaped any lip in my hearing. The English 
are a marvelous people. 

The young lieutenant in the Y. M. C. A. 
service already referred to, was formerly in 
the Princess Patricia's regiment. Of that gal- 
lant unit not more than a half dozen or so are 
in active service. Our lieutenant had not 
sufficiently recovered from wounds to take the 
field. On this day at Folkestone his hands 
were bloody to the wrists from his activity 
in first aid to the wounded. 

Our little driver, Frank, was due to come 
for us at six-thirty, detailed by the Army 
Service Corps, to drive us out for a meeting 
at Otterpool. The raid took place at six and 
lasted until six-ten. When the time for us 
to start came, and no Frank appeared, I began 
to look about for a car; since, raid or no 
raid, the boys at Otterpool would be expecting 
us, and ought not to be disappointed. Of 



22 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

course all cars were busy with the dead and 
wounded. 

At last, at six-forty-five, here came Frank, 
his head bandaged, and no cap on. He had 
driven his car out of the garage at six o'clock, 
and stood beside the Osmond hotel. One 
bomb wrecked the hotel; another fell in the 
street thirty yards in front of him; another, 
a like distance behind him. Debris or a bit 
of a bomb laid open his head. They took him 
into the hospital, and the surgeon sewed him 
up and said: 

"Now, Frank, you lie there," indicating a 
cot. 

"But," objected Frank, "I've got to drive 
those Americans out to Otterpool!" 

"Frank, lie there!" repeated the surgeon. 
"You're in hospital." 

When the surgeon's back was turned, little 
Frank, nineteen or twenty, slipped out at a 
side door and appeared at our pension only 
fifteens minutes late and his hand as steady as 
mine now as I write. He drove us thirty 
miles an hour in his little "Tin Lizzie," upon 
which the bits of brick and mortar were still 
lying, out to Otterpool. We made him lie 
down during our meeting, then he drove us 
home again with the greatest steadiness. 



Ill 

TOMMY ATKINS IN AN AUDIENCE 

*'^^OME on, boys, let's have a sing-song! 
I, What shall it be?" 

"Arizona! Tennessee! At my 
home in Kentucky! Pack up your troubles 
in your old kit bag!" There are a score of 
different suggestions. Then Jack selects what 
he pleases; he meant to, all along, anyway. 
He sits down to the piano; he is the only 
song leader in the Y. M. C. A. who doesn't 
look around for an accompaniest ; then he 
shouts : 

"Come on! Let's go!" That's all that is 
necessary. The Tommies do the rest. The 
dust comes down off the rafters. 

After a half hour of uproarious choruses, 
varied by solos from Jack, and one or two 
hymns or home songs, to lead up to the spoken 
word. Jack turns the meeting over to me. By 
this time the hut is jammed, men are standing 
crowded all around the windows. Sometimes 
they sit all over the platform and on the floor 
in the aisles. 

23 



24 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

Now when a speaker has a slippery audience 
like this delivered into his hand, it is like 
manipulating an eel. Fancy giving out a text 

and saying: *'Now, brethren " One 

might deliver a moving sermon ; it would move 
Tommy out of the door. No, no, all our 
American men have made a conscientious 
study of their opening sentences; for they 
know that with Tommies the whole thing is 
won or lost in the first two minutes. Hold 
that audience for five minutes in any way, 
by hook or crook, and you can swing into a 
moral or religious drive and make it as strong 
as you like; you couldn't shoo your audience 
away. They'll stay with you, glued to the 
benches, for an hour. 

One of our men begins: 

"If there's a man here homesicker than I 
am, he'd better beat it! I want to see my 
little kid at home!" Tommy yells with 
laughter and sympathy. 

Another throws out this, like a shot from 
a 6-inch gun: 

"Up till the other day you and I were 
cousins; now we are brothers-in-the-blood !" 

For myself, I have evolved out of old bor- 
rowed witticisms something like this: 

"Tell me, men, honor bright and on the 
square, if we hadn't been introduced as 



Tommy Atkins in an Audience 25 

Americans you wouldn't have known it, would 
you?" 

Groans, yells, catcalls and "Oh, no! Sure! 
GVan!" 

Then I add: 

"A fellow said to me the other day: 'You 
can always tell an American, but you can't 
tell him much !' " 

More groans, and an inquiring frame of 
mind. They don't know whether this is 
proverbial American boasting or not. Then: 
"I have heard, too, that the difference be- 
tween an Englishman and an American is 
about this : An Englishman walks into a house 
as if he owned the whole damn place. An 
American walks in as if he didn't give a damn 
who owned the place." 

We are now getting on. Tommy feels sure 
there is no firstly, secondly and thirdly coming 
along. I usually consult the secretary or the 
chaplain before introducing this unexpurgated, 
old thread-bare comparison which, I believe, 
was first made between a Harvard man and 
a Yale man; but I find it usually unnecessary 
to consult long at a time. 

"Anyway, I hope that some day Englishman 
and American may walk, each in his own 
way, into certain houses in Potsdam and Ber- 
lin " 



26 Facing the Hindenburg line 

And the trick is done. I now have Tommy 
by the ear; and better audience one need not 
desire on this earth, more appreciative, sensi- 
tive, quick to any appeal of humor, emotion, 
moral motive or spiritual idealism. You can 
talk about this war driving the people who 
are in it to atheism; it does, a few, but the 
vast majority are driven to their knees. The 
huts do not gather in simply the religious; 
they gather in, with their tea and cakes, old 
scarred veterans and soft-cheeked lads indis- 
criminately, all sorts and conditions, excellent 
cross-sections they are, of the entire British 
army. 

In the first five minutes I generally drag in 
a reference to "Teddy" Roosevelt. It always 
takes fire. One night a man arose in the 
middle of the house and tossed a bronze cap- 
badge upon the platform at my feet. I have 
it before me now. It is the colonel's face sur- 
round with the words, "First Illinois, Chicago 
Rough Riders." I meet scores and scores of 
Americans, mostly in the Canadian battalions, 
but some in the other Imperials. 

Then shortly I refer to President Woodrow 
Wilson and there is a hearty, generous round 
of applause. The average Englishman now 
looks upon our President as a very wise, care- 
ful, conservative man. An officer told me the 



Tommy Atkins in an Audience 27 

past week that Lloyd George had said to him 
sometime ago that America ought not to have 
come in any sooner than she did; she was of 
more use as a neutral than as a belligerent 
until just now. 

Viewed from outside, a Red Triangle hut 
in the British camps presents very much the 
appearance of a ranch house on our western 
plains. It is long, low, rectangular; built of 
rough boards and stained brown. There is a 
counter at one end where are sold cigarettes, 
chocolate, coffee, stamps and the various neces- 
sities and luxuries of Tommy Atkins' life. 
There are tables where tea, coffee, malted 
milk and soft bottled drinks are dispensed, to- 
gether with biscuits and cakes. In some huts 
there are billiard tables; in all, checkers, chess 
and dominoes. At the other end of the room 
is a stage, with piano and an auditorium. 

In the late afternoon, when drill is done, 
and the Tommies are tired, hungry and 
thirsty, the huts fairly swarm, like bee hives; 
and business is brisk. Your Englishman prizes 
his tea beyond measure ; and the United King- 
dom consumes more sugar than any other 
nation in the world. One day a Canadian 
Y. M. C. A. secretary was decorated by King 
George in Hyde Park with the Military 
Cross because, at Vimy Ridge, he kept up with 



28 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

the advancing line, and served chocolate and 
biscuits to the men, under shell fire. 

The Canadian secretaries who first came out 
were commissioned as captains, later ones as 
lieutenants, and are under military orders ; but 
as the authorities are distinctly favorable to 
the organization, these officers have wide dis- 
cretion. The English secretaries are civilians, 
independent of military discipline, for the most 
part are dressed in "civies," and consider that 
they have an advantage in not being officers. 
The Canadians, too, prefer their own regime. 
In general, the Canadian huts are better 
manned and managed, and, so far as one can 
see, their secretaries get as close to the men 
as do the civilian secretaries among the English 
troops. Still it may be added, all Canadian 
officers are much more democratic with their 
men than are the English. 

The huts furnish tons and tons of writing 
paper, free, to the men ; and, as a consequence, 
the tables are full, in off hours, of busy 
writers. The Y. M. C. A. makes money in 
some of its canteens and loses in others; but, 
on the whole, does not pay expenses. Private 
subscriptions make up the deficit. Canadian 
secretaries are paid as officers; English are 
practically unpaid. 

Certain Canadian officers are authority for 



Tommy Atkins in an Audience 29 

the story that the other day all the officers in 
a certain command having fallen, the Y. M. 
secretary took charge, led the men, and was 
killed; he was blown to bits; he was not even 
found. The English secretaries are under- 
sized, or over thin, or crippled, or too old 
for service. Some men, fairly fit, have been 
taken from the huts and hurried to the 
trenches. I met a little thin rector in a hut 
at Aldershot one day who has asked for and 
received an appointment in France to go 
right into the dugout huts in the trenches. 
He starts next week. 

One of our favorite song leaders in the 
huts is a Canadian, Captain Pequegnot, fa- 
miliarly known everywhere here as "Captain 
Peg," who was gassed in the very first gas 
attack in France. He has never entirely re- 
covered, as the puffed look about the eyes 
indicates; but his singing voice is unimpaired, 
also his jovial smile, that made him once a 
successful commercial traveler all over the 
American continent. He understands all the 
Tommies, and they, him; he can make them 
roar like bulls of Bashan and render them wild 
with joy, like March hares, whatever they 
are. He **carries on" for half an hour before 
introducing a speaker. "Carry on" is a favor- 



30 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

ite word here for "perform," and is constantly 
in use. 

My own steady sidepartner — for we usually 
travel in pairs, a singer and a speaker — is 
young Jack Barker, who hails from Girard, 
Kas., and who has been the last five years in 
Chicago. He has just been graduated from 
Northwestern, president of his class, leader 
of the glee club, an athlete of great success, 
runs a hundred yards in ten seconds flat, has 
a barytone that gives him a steady job in a 
Chicago quartet choir, and a smile that draws 
young men to him like submarines to a net — 
blindly. He can play and sing more kinds of 
ragtime than even an Englishman ever 
dreamed of. 

We go into a hut at about 7 p.m., usually; 
Jack goes to the piano on the platform, beats 
out a storm of pseudo-negro melody that sets 
shoulders to wriggling, feet to shuffling, eyes 
to dancing; and when he finishes with a bang 
like a bomb from a German aircraft, the Tom- 
mies yell. Then Jack just looks at them and 
grins, and they yell some more. 

At the close of our meetings we sometimes 
give the men a chance to sign pledge cards 
of religious confession and allegiance — a card 
indorsed by the archbishop of Canterbury as 
well as by Free Church leaders. Any man 



Tommy Atkins in an Audience 31 

may conscientiously sign it, no matter what 
his Christian denomination or predilection; 
and from thirty to a hundred and thirty 
usually sign every night. Some ask us to 
write and tell their wives or families what they 
have done. 

The other night a Kansas City lad, in a 
Canadian battalion, whose parents did not 
know where he was, promised to write next 
day to his mother, while I wrote to his father. 

Then, the last thing of all, comes the hand- 
shaking — Tommy loves to shake hands and 
Jack usually announces after we sing "The 
King," which closes every public meeting in the 
British army, that we shall be glad to shake 
hands with every man in the room. "Please 
come down this side and go out that side." 
And they come ! It was hard on our muscles at 
first, but now we're used to it, for Tommy 
shakes hands as if he meant it. Then it's: 
"Thank you, Jack," "Glad you came, captain," 
"Come again," "God bless you." 

And we answer as they file by: "Thanks, 
old man," "Mighty glad to be here," "God 
keep you, my lad," "Good luck to you all the 
way," and so on. 

Sometimes one pauses and asks a question 
or presents a problem; then it is a word of 
quick answer and a hasty "God take care of 



32 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

you"; for they know and we know they have 
need enough of God's care; to-morrow they 
may be in the trenches; the day after, over 
the parapet; maybe over the dark river. 

Then Jack stands by the piano and they 
gather round him like flies on a sugar lump; 
and I take a chair on the auditorium floor, 
and there are several files deep all around me, 
their faces pressed almost against my own, 
eager eyes straining and tongues going. Ques- 
tions and comments come quick and fast. 
The American navy, the submarines, the air 
craft, the merits and possibilities of cavalry, 
and the old, old question, "How long do you 
think it will last, captain?" pour forth in a 
torrent. 

"Yes, sir, this wound came from 'La Bas- 
see.' " "I got mine at Vimy Ridge." "Yes, 
sir, wounded twice, and back to France next 
week." "How can I get a transfer to the 
American army?" "I got mine in the thigh. 
I can walk three miles as good as any man, 
but not thirty. I'm done. But I could teach 
bayonet work and bomb throwin', sir." 

Sometimes your throat is full and choked. 



IV 
THE BRITISH FRONT IN FRANCE 

I HAVE pretty well traveled Northern 
France and the British front from the 
sea to the Somme. For about eighty 
miles of that one hundred and twenty, I have 
been close up to the front lines and have seen 
the activities there. All those battlefields so 
famous, embraced within that eighty miles I 
have explored. I have driven over registered 
roads, that is, roads that the Germans keep 
carefully mapped and can shell at any place 
or time. I have picked up pathetic relics upon 
three of the greatest battlefields of the world, 
still fresh with the awful scars of conflict — 
Messines, Vimy Ridge and the Somme. I have 
been in the most advanced line of the British 
and have looked over the top and down on 
the Hindenburg line. I have listened to the 
shrilling of our own shells over my head, felt 
the trembling of the earth when our great 
guns spoke and watched the black bursts of 
the Boche high explosives on either side of 
me within our own lines. 

This is written in the lovely old chateau of 



34 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

Count de , rented to the British gov- 
ernment for the war. The count has his room 
reserved, which he occupies occasionally. We 
drove up a beautiful avenue of elms, four 
rows of them, shading the driveway in and 
out. Four British Tommies, serving as but- 
lers met us at the doorway and took our lug- 
gage to our rooms. Mine overlooks the 
driveway, and the large court in front of the 
chateau, where motor-lorries now are being 
unloaded with fresh gravel for court and 
drives. I find hot water provided in my 
private lavatory in a little pewter jug; a huge 
tub, ready for my morning bath; an electric 
reading lamp and a candle on the stand be- 
side my Napoleon bed ; and I am writing upon 
a beautiful walnut table of the time of Louis 
XVI. Is this war? I can listen and hear 
the guns. 

There are four of us entertained at this 
chateau, an English member of the diplomatic 
service, an Italian literary man, and a widely 
known English novelist. There are other 
visitors as well; but these constitute our par- 
ticular contingent. 

It was fairly lively along the line, but on 
the whole not what it can be when it is de- 
sired. 

We saw the desolate villages; a beautiful 



The British Front in France 35 

city — Arras — that once held some forty thou- 
sand people, now a vast wilderness of ruined 
cathedral, town hall and station, with street 
after street that looked worse than the wake 
of a western cyclone. In these streets are 
still the trenches facing each other. They run 
across the Grand Place, into and through 
houses and railway station. There are masses 
of tangled and broken barbed wire and blasted 
trench; adjacent are miles and miles of battle- 
fields that were once smiling farms and are 
now the floors of craters. 

Yet of all this destruction, even the noble 
cathedral, like a broken widow, disheveled 
and mourning, held nothing like the fascina- 
tion for us that yonder line of living flashes, 
bursting shells and upheaved earth possessed. 
English observation balloons were strung out 
for miles along the line. We stood under one 
as it went up ; and from that spot counted nine 
in the air. German planes came over us as 
we stood there; and soon from their signals, 
no doubt, the Boche batteries opened upon us. 
You should have seen our captain hustle us 
into our motor-car and hurry us away, while 
the sound of our own "big stuff" rumbled over 
our heads, replying to the German. 

Finally a German sausage balloon appeared. 
It was while we were at luncheon on the grassy 



36 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

bank beside the road. We all gazed at the 
balloon through our glasses. Then we glanced 
away, and in ten seconds, someone cried: 
"There, it's gone!" 

It was true. There was nothing left but a 
puff of smoke, slowly enlarging in the air. 
One of our planes had brought it down. 

Look, there are three German planes, very 
high, directly over our heads. Our anti-aircraft 
guns opened almost as rapidly as machine 
guns; and little dots of white shrapnel smoke 
encircled the silver insects in the sky. They 
turned tail and sailed away home, with two 
of our machines mounting rapidly toward 
them. Then followed the rattle of the 
machine guns from the sky overhead; and so 
the aerial duels kept up all the day. There is 
no doubt the cavalry of the future is the 
cavalry of the air; and that the most useful 
contribution our nation can make to the cause 
of our allies is thousands of planes and tens 
of thousands of airmen to drive them. 

We ate our lunches on the east side of a 
road over a commanding ridge; and as we 
lay there on the grass we saw the results of 
the scouting done by those three planes. The 
German guns, which had been strafing a 
village on an opposite ridge, turned their aim 
nearer, on a green spot on the slope. Shell 



The British Front in France 37 

after shell was planted in a space that seemed 
to us not over a hundred yards in diameter. 

"They must be searching for an ammuni- 
tion dump," said the captain. "Those three 
Hun planes must have observed it." 

That luncheon on the ridge was the most 
interesting one I ever ate. That is to say, 
the entertainment provided for eyes and ears, 
was beyond all shows ever spread before ab- 
sorbed humanity. No doubt other men have 
eaten with perhaps vaster scenes before them, 
but I never had. There was the wide French 
valley, most of which had been fought over, 
inch by inch, already covering its yellow clay 
nakedness with verdure, with poppies and dog 
daisies; there were our convoys in approach- 
ing roads, troops marching, Red Cross wagons 
moving, horses and mules and motor lorries 
by the hundreds, all doing something to con- 
tribute to the show. There were our own big 
guns betraying their location to our eyes by 
occasional flashes and the whistle and rush of 
the "big stuff" going like chain lightning over 
our heads; and there was, most picturesque 
of all, the beautiful battle in the air. 

Half way through luncheon our captain told 
us we were really violating the law, being 
without helmet and gas mask. We had left 
ours in the car standing in the cut in the road 



38 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

behind us. We all smiled, however, and went 
on with our luncheon; knowing how careful 
British officers are of the safety of their 
visitors, and knowing if the danger were im- 
minent he would insist upon every precaution. 
Two days later, we never got out of touch with 
our helmets and gas masks, but wore them 
almost the entire day. We kept our heads 
down, too, when told that we should; for 
only a week ago a French correspondent was 
killed about where we stood. A German 
sniper picked him off. 

What fascinated me, almost as much as the 
air battles, was a dawning appreciation of the 
subterranean fights, the deadly game of hide- 
and-seek all the time going on. Of course, 
I had read of the mining and counter mining; 
and heard of the mine craters; but one can 
form no conception of these things until he 
walks the underground galleries and stands 
beside and in such a yawning punch bowl as 
that of Messines. It is impossible to put the 
picture in words. It was not these things, 
however, that overwhelmed me with a sense 
of the battle of the cave men ; but it was when, 
with a candle in hand, thirty feet under 
ground, damp dripping all over me, and my 
feet covered with the white chalk mud, I met 
face to face and talked for half an hour with 



The British Front in France 39 

a sergeant major who had lived and dug and 
fought for more than a year in the veins of the 
earth under Messines. 

He was a Durham miner, and he was "some 
man." All the time, he knew, and all his 
comrades knew, that German miners were 
digging towards him, above him, beneath him. 
Each side knew the others' activities, and were 
springing mines, closing each others' galleries, 
blocking one anothers' parties off from air and 
food. It takes brains and ingenuity as well 
as daring and science to win underground. 
The Teuton is not lacking in theory, system, 
science and a certain practical precision; but 
when it comes to intellectual self-reliance and 
inventiveness, he goes down before the Anglo- 
Saxon, or else, as at Messines, he goes up. 

In a dugout in these same galleries, I came 
upon a group of ten or a dozen Tommies, 
standing up munching their dejeuner. One of 
them stuck out his hand to me in the semi- 
darkness, saying: 

"Hi, there, America, I'm from Ohio. I 
knew as soon as I saw the gold cord on that 
field hat you were from the States. I was in 
the Fourth Ohio at the Mexican border. This 
is an American bunch in here, five or six of 
us are Americans. Let me see, here's one, 
here's another." 



40 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

That lad was surely loquacious; a little 
touch of home made him feel the whole world 
kin. That was not a Canadian battalion, 
either. Next day, the man highest up on 
Vimy, and nearest the enemy, said, as soon as 
he saw me : "I'm from Frisco." He was in a 
Canadian unit; for, of course, the Canadians 
have earned the right to Vimy Ridge. 

One more little incident. It was late after- 
noon, and we had paused for tea in a shat- 
tered town. We had been there earlier in the 
day and saw very few soldiers; now there 
seemed thousands in the streets. They had 
been in the cellars sleeping during the day. 
Falling in with the stream of them now, we 
soon arrived at the Ace of Spades theater. 
A section of the army has improvised this 
theater and puts on its own performances ; and 
very creditable they are, too. 

I stood at the rear, jammed into the big old 
hall of a half crumbled stone structure, with 
fifteen hundred Tommies from all quarters of 
the earth, and watched a blond young beauty, 
handsomely begowned, with plenty of silk 
stocking and plenty of daring eyeflashes, sing, 
dance and flirt with three harlequins on the 
stage, and three rows of officers in the front. 
A most careful inspection could find no flaw 



The British Front in France 41 

in the figure except, perhaps, the rather liberal 
dimension of feet and hands. 

Here, I decided quickly, was an excellent 
place to get rid of the large importation of 
Virginia cigarettes, which the generosity of 
certain friends at home had made it possible 
for me to bring over from London. Here at 
the front tobacco is hard to come by, especially 
American tobacco, dear to the heart of the 
British army. And nobody in England or her 
army smokes cigars, except an occasional duke 
or earl or wandering American nabob like 
myself. Comparatively few smoke pipes. 
Everybody smokes cigarettes, including padres 
and Y. M. C. A. secretaries. Nobody drinks, 
even in officers' messes, so far as my observa- 
tion has thus far gone, half so deeply as the 
average American clubman. The king's ex- 
ample seems to count. Crossing the Channel, 
in the restaurant on the boat, where nearly 
every English gentleman a few years ago 
would have had his scotch and soda, I heard, 
the other day, officer after officer call for soft 
drinks. Whisky was the rare exception. 

Well, anyway, in the Ace of Spades theater, 
the cigarettes were turned over to the corporal 
in charge of the show; and one of the harle- 
quins, at the end of a song, came out smoking 
one, and, announcing that here were the com- 



42 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

pliments of friends in America, began tossing 
out the boxes. Such a yelling, howling, happy- 
bunch of Tommies I never saw together be- 
fore. That same afternoon, on a road leading 
up to the trenches, we stopped a line of hot, 
grim-faced men, bearing each his sixty pounds 
of kit on his back, and gave a package to each 
man. It was a study to see their faces light 
up. We paused, too, at a dressing station, 
where wounded had been brought in the last 
night from one of those little raids which are 
of such regular occurrence nowadays on our 
side of the line; and, passing among the 
stretchers a package and a greeting from 
friends across the sea, went to each man. All 
who could smile did smile. 



GREAT BRITAIN JUST BEGINNING 
TO FIGHT 

IF I were asked what is the mood which, 
more than any other, marked the British 
army at the front and the British nation 
back of it, at this time, I should reply, "Con- 
fidence." From all I can hear, this could not 
have been said four or five months previous 
to the summer of 191 7. Then there was pro- 
found uneasiness lest the submarine should 
starve the island kingdom, lest the mighty ring 
of steel about the central empires should fly 
into a hundred shattered bits and the face of 
the world be changed. Why has confidence 
succeeded this apprehension? The answer I 
get on all sides is: "America has come in!" 
From what I learned at the front, if any 
still cherish the fond hope that a great gap 
will one day be made in the Hindenburg line, 
and the sides of that gap rolled up upon them- 
selves in a swift turning movement of cavalry, 
as in the old warfare, let him reconsider it at 
once. You need only to glimpse the modern 



44 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

enginery of war; walk over, or rather clamber, 
slip, slide and jump over the field across which 
it has rolled, to become instantly aware of 
how utterly impossible it is that light troops 
should here ever again, with flying banners, 
dash after a routed foe. War is no longer a 
"blue racer" that speeds over ground; it is a 
huge caterpillar that crawls, a measuring 
worm that humps itself up and inches pain- 
fully and slowly along. War has always gone 
forward on its belly, and now its numbers have 
become so huge, its necessary equipment so 
multitudinous, that to supply its wants a whole 
industrial system must accompany it forward. 
Railways, telegraphs, depots, shops, stores, 
buildings, offices, all must crawl forward with 
it, and that, too, over volcanic .surfaces that 
must be remade and rendered traversable. 

To be sure, I met officers in a machine gun 
school who are experimenting and expecting 
"a more liquid state of warfare" ; but I thought 
I could see that they were not sanguine of 
such a consummation in the very near future. 
No symptoms of liquefaction are discernible 
at present; gelatinous is the adjective that best 
characterizes the existing state; mud, putty- 
like, tenacious mud, unromantic, sordid, ugly 
mud — that conveys the impression of the 
whole glorious field of war to any man who 



Great Britain Beginning to Fight 45 

has seen it or had a hand in it. No, it is only 
by pushing the heavy motor truck of war for- 
ward through the mud, inch by inch, that 
the English hope to win; and they know that 
we Americans have got to get our backs, and 
hands, and feet, and faces into the mud with 
them and push and bite and sweat and bleed, 
in order that civilization may be saved. 

There are still a few left of the old type of 
cavalry officers who feel that some day their 
horsemen will come into use on the western 
front. But for the most part these horsemen 
are grooming their mounts and kicking their 
spurs and going on parade many miles behind 
the big guns; and the officers close up in the 
line smile as they allude to an occasional press 
dispatch which tells how a hole was made and 
the cavalry came dashing up. Besides, little 
triangular bits of steel, so made with three 
spines that one of them always points up, can 
be strewn by the handful across any road ; and 
a few strands of barbed wire — omnipresent in 
this war — will play havoc with any troop of 
horse that dared to dash anywhere. Very 
circumspect and gingerly must be the advance 
of horsemen over these fields. 

"But,'* you say, "is the German not con- 
fident, too, these days?" 

If so, his confidence is not founded on facts. 



46 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

but upon government dictated reports. The 
government allows the newspapers to print 
only what suits it. There is no doubt on this 
point. The average soldier or officer, on either 
side, knows from personal experience only a 
very small bit of the line, his own salient, or 
strip of trench, or what he can discern from 
a neighboring hilltop. We, however, are 
privileged to see, with our own eyes, the con- 
ditions covering nearly a hundred miles of 
British front. The ordinary fighting man 
must take his knowledge from what the press 
contains, or his fellows, close at hand, can 
tell him. So German prisoners, when told 
they will be taken to London, begin to laugh: 

"Why, London is destroyed!" 

"You'll see," comes the quiet answer. 

"Besides, no prison ship, nor any other, can 
cross the seas. Our submarines destroy all 
British ships." 

They do cross; they do see London; they 
realize, when it is too late to communicate 
their knowledge, that England looks just as she 
has always done except for her men in khaki 
and her factories pouring out gun and shell. 
There is no mistake at all that the German 
people are deceived — systematically deceived — 
by the men that rule her. Of course I could 
not approach German prisoners, although I 



Great Britain Beginning to Fight 47 

saw many; but I could talk to the sergeant 
majors and commissioned officers who handle 
them. The prisoners are all cheerful, happy, 
hard-working. They delight in their tasks, as 
Germans always do. If they had kept on at 
work instead of going to war they might have 
conquered the world. 

By the way, I talked all one evening to a 
delightful Scotch major, an attorney from the 
Highlands. When we asked him if there was 
any fraternizing between his troops and the 
Germans he replied: 

"I'd like to see the Hieland mon that would 
fraternize wi' onybody!" 

Furthermore, the German confidence is ooz- 
ing. The Boche is like a cask, the seams of 
which have been sprung by the British artil- 
lery. He is leaking out his spirit. Slowly, 
in spite of his inspired press and his menda- 
cious government, he is becoming aware that 
his case is hopeless. If his psychology is such 
that ax and crowbar are needed, at times, to 
get ideas in, ax and crowbar have certainly 
been used. He no longer fights downhill. He 
is fighting an uphill fight. He no longer pos- 
sesses superior artillery. Even an amateur 
can see for himself where the major hand is 
at the front. He no longer scouts in the air 
unimpeded; he does precious little scouting at 



48 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

all, although he does some and always has to 
fight his way. 

It is just a question, then, of constant pres- 
sure and biting. How long that process must 
continue before the Boche caves in no man 
can tell. There are signs of cracking here 
and there. You can hear the great structure 
groan and creak clear across the Atlantic al- 
most as well as one can here. When it will 
collapse is hidden from all but the gods alone; 
but that it will collapse, unless something en- 
tirely unforeseen occurs, nobody in England 
any longer doubts. 

Confidence, therefore, is in the heart of the 
British nation. It cheers them immensely to 
realize that as long as the British bulldog is 
hanging on to the throat of the HohenzoUerns 
so long will Uncle Sam be hanging on to the 
ear, the hind leg, the flank, or wherever he 
can get a hold. I asked one of the leading 
British war correspondents one day what he 
believed America could best do for the general 
cause. His jaws snapped like Roosevelt's as 
he spat out : 

*'Give the death blow !" 

A dozen other officers, in reply to the same 
question, and the head of a department at the 
foreign office, and twenty men on the street, 
all reply: 



Great Britain Beginning to Fight 49 

"Come to us in the air! Bring on war- 
planes by the thousands! Finish them from 
above ! That is the only fluid warfare !" 

Perhaps the press dispatches give America 
some idea of the heartening effect of Ameri- 
can entrance to the war. But I doubt if 
the length and breadth and depth of that effect 
can be conveyed in the printed word. But this 
is certain: We have come at the instant of 
the greatest need to stand beside France, to 
take part of her load, to revive the drooping 
lilies, to repay in a beautiful fashion the debt 
we have owed her throughout our young life. 

When all is said and done, however, it 
grows plainer and plainer every day that it is 
with our motherland that our future destiny 
is to be cast. England is our natural ally. 
For France, we have a sentimental, grateful 
regard; but with England the tie is one of 
interest, business and political interest, as well 
as blood and common speech and common 
ideals. There has existed between the two 
nations, British and American, a quiet under- 
standing for nearly a hundred years. To prove 
it we have only to look to the three thousand 
miles of undefended Canadian border. We 
have only to remember that at Subig Bay on 
the famous day when Dewey dumped the 
Philippines in our lap, there were two other 



50 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

fleets at hand, a German and a British. Said 
the German admiral to the British: 

"What are you going to do about it?" 

Said the British admiral to the German: 

"That is known only to Admiral Dewey and 
myself." 

We have only to remember the words of 
Admiral Sims some seven years ago in Lon- 
don, words for which, if I remember, he was 
called home and publicly rebuked and privately 
patted on the back: 

"If ever the British Empire is seriously 
threatened from without, she will find the 
United States ready with every ship, every 
dollar and every drop of blood, to come to her 
defense." 

Those words are not only fulfilled in seven 
years, but the author of them is promoted and 
in command of our naval forces on this side 
at the present moment. We have only to re- 
member, further, that when we fixed the tolls 
for the Panama Canal England remonstrated 
with us, and we gave in to her; that her navy 
makes possible our Monroe Doctrine; that she 
accepted our mandate gracefully in the Vene- 
zuela matter, when she knew and we knew 
she could have blown us out of the water. 

Britannia rules the waves. Without a doubt 
she must continue to rule them. And it is to 



Great Britain Beginning to Fight 51 

our interest that she should. Why should we 
ever try to rule it, when it is so much cheaper 
to have her do it for us? Nor is it likely 
that we shall ever build such a merchant 
marine as to compete with her. Why create 
a new express company when there is a line 
already in existence that we may ultilize on 
equitable terms? We may build some ships, 
doubtless will; but economic conditions are 
such that America will not be likely ever to 
attempt competition with the natural common 
carrier of the world, Great Britain. 

No, it is to our interest, as well as in har- 
mony with our cardinal principles of democ- 
racy, freedom of the seas, open ports, rights 
of peoples to choose their own governments, 
freedom of conscience; all these and more 
that we should stand shoulder to shoulder 
with Great Britain. It is little odds whether 
the alliance is a tacit one, as in the past, or 
an articulated one in the future. A quiet un- 
derstanding with Great Britain is more lasting 
and more binding than a treaty, signed, sealed 
and delivered at Berlin. These two great 
English speaking peoples may and please God 
they will, together with such allies as they can 
gather around them, into a league for peace, 
a federation of states, what you please, for the 



52 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

next thousand years, keep the peace of the 
world. 

We can, in other and far finer words, fulfill 
the dream of the English poet laureate — no, 
not English any more than our own — the poet 
laureate of English speaking people every- 
where, when he sang: 

"I dipped into the future far as human eye could 

see. 
Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that 

would be; 
Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of 

golden sails, 
Pilots of the purple twilight drooping down with 

costly bales; 
Heard the heavens filled with shouting, and there 

rain'd a ghastly dew, 
From the nations* airy navies, grappling in the central 

blue, 
Till the war drums beat no longer, and the battle 

flags were furled 
In the parliament of man, the federation of the world." 



VI 



'^GENTLEMEN, ONCE MORE INTO 
THE BREACH" 

ASKED by a friend at the visitors' cha- 
teau, British headquarters in FrancCj, 
^ what is my most outstanding impres- 

sion after examining most of the western front, 
my reply was and is: "The power and calm 
precision of Great Britain." 

This power and precision at the front is 
apparent even to a military tyro like myself. 
For a strip of at least thirty miles back of the 
fighting line England's great organization 
ceaselessly moves, wheel within wheel, cog 
upon cog, without haste, without creaking and 
screaming, without generating unnecessary 
heat. We saw a lorry in the ditch once or 
twice, but others were calmly pulling it out. 
We saw huge guns patiently standing under 
poplar trees, while men and traction engines 
paused for breath. We saw the field where the 
tanks stood in their stalls, to be groomed like 
— war horses, I started to say ; war mastodons 
is better. We saw two tanks stranded on the 

63 



54 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

field of Messines. We saw the airplanes in 
their hangars, the only things that looked im- 
patient, as if they were caged falcons ; but the 
young lieutenants who drive them are the calm- 
est of the calm, with all the devil-may-care 
way they have about them. It was all impres- 
sive, stopped your breath at times and made 
your heart go fast. 

As for headquarters, it is always the quietest 
place in the war zone. There are a few motor 
cars, but not so many as at a field hospital. 
As for the men about headquarters, the calm 
and the reserve cannot be said to increase with 
the rank of the officers, but it certainly does 
not diminish. These men drive or walk in ex- 
posed positions as calmly as they attend to any 
other parts of their concerns. 

We passed through a little village where are 
many French people living their accustomed 
lives, and where British Tommies are billeted. 
As we drove through it we noted children going 
home from school. One British soldier lay on 
the grass by the side of the road playing with 
three or four little girls. I particularly marked 
him for his apparent love of little children. 
Five minutes later, from the shoulder of a hill, 
we looked back and saw three German shells 
explode in that little hamlet, throwing up 
masses of brick, dirt, dust and smoke. How 



e< 



Once More into the Breach " 55 



many lives either of soldiers or non-combatants 
were taken in toll we never learned, but I have 
been unable to forget that soldier and those 
little ones. 

Weeks after, when I mentioned the village 
and the circumstances, a British officer replied: 
"Yes, nobody goes there often, who does not 
expect sooner or later to get hit. It is a hot 
spot." 

It is significant to observe, in these frontier 
villages, the number of commingled races en- 
gaged in the death grapple with the Hun. As 
we sat waiting for a bridge across a canal to 
close and let us by, we noted English, Portu- 
guese, French, Algerian and Hindu allies 
standing about and trying to communicate. 
The Portuguese are neat, light built, swarthy 
little fellows, very smart in their light blue 
uniforms, quite similar to the French. We saw 
columns of them going to and coming from the 
front, their transports, consisting largely of 
animal drawn vehicles, and their air partaking 
somewhat of the jauntiness of the Japanese. 
They seem to have made a very favorable im- 
pression upon their British comrades, of whom, 
I am told, they are very fond. Portugal, the 
brand new republic, is likely to make a place of 
value for herself in international affairs by her 
conduct in this war. 



56 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

There is evident eagerness along the front 
to welcome and discuss America and her en- 
trance into the game. If nothing more than 
her moral support and the increased confidence 
which she has engendered in the breasts of the 
Allies, were to result, her part has not been 
played in vain; but there is much more that 
she is already doing over here. She has com- 
panies of foresters and railway men at work 
in England. Altogether, she is surprising her 
allies by the rapidity of her action. But the 
hope I hear expressed on all sides is that she 
will speed up the manufacture of war planes 
and the training of her young men to drive 
them. There is no other way so quickly and 
adequately to put an end to the air raids on de- 
fenceless women and children, as by filling the 
air with cavalry. The vexed question of repri- 
sals, which is disturbing the British press and 
public, will then take care of itself. 

A few hasty pictures of interesting spots 
must suffice for this chapter. Our car stops 
in the rain, at the foot of a steep and muddy 
path between dripping hedges. We dig in our 
sticks, and slip and slide and crawl, up, through 
paths and trenches, past dugouts and sandbag 
cottages, to a dizzy wooded hill, high over 
fighting ground. Here we look down from a 
perfect observatory, fitted with telescopes, tele- 



<< 



Once More into the Breach " 57 



phones, and wireless, upon the ground below, 
held by the Boches. 

It was a point of wild beauty and grandeur, 
commanding view and an air of romance, fif- 
teen hundred feet, it seemed above the plain, 
approached only by naturally and artifically 
screened ways, impregnable to attack. 

Suicide Corner is the name given to a bend 
in a certain village street. The houses had all 
died of spinal meningitis, paralysis and small- 
pox. Such battered and punctured stucco, still 
to stand in the shape of walls, it is difficult to 
conceive. Of course the tide of battle has rolled 
on beyond now, but to make the scene real, a 
"walking wounded" man turned the corner as 
we drove by, his arm hanging in a blood- 
stained sling and his face ghastly pale. He 
stood, however, and chatted awhile with the 
military policeman who was there to direct 
traffic. I shall never forget that face, as he 
strove hard, by puffing a cigarette, to keep his 
features from working with pain. Several am- 
bulances came along just at this time, filled 
with recumbent and sitting forms, red band- 
ages visible, on the way fi:om the advanced 
dressing station to the field hospital. There 
had been a bit of a raid somewhere near last 
night or a shellburst in a bad spot to-day. 

We alighted one afternoon to view the ruins 



58 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

of a handsome chateau that the retreating Ger- 
mans had blown up as they left. The gates and 
winding walks were there, the cement fish-pond 
and even some of the flowering plants and 
shrubs ; but the house itself was the best illus- 
tration of the phrase "not one stone left upon 
another," that I ever saw. Literally there were 
not two bricks or stones still fastened together. 
Even the cement, which had remained set for 
centuries, was crumbled into the general sand 
heap. It was a house left desolate, and Nature 
was doing her best to cover it with weeds and 
wild flowers that the place thereof should 
know it no more forever. 

Leading down the slope from that chateau 
for half-a-mile or so, is a deep cut road, — the 
famous sunken road — ^bordered by Boche dug- 
outs. It is like a street of tenements, once in- 
habited by rabbits. When the English took it 
over Tommy refused to burrow and to-day he 
lives in tents where the Germans once lived 
under ground. I saw football and cricket, a 
rifle range and a practicing band, — ^the band 
made up largely of boys of twelve to sixteen — 
the bath houses with scores of naked bathers, 
the laundries and disinfecting plants all out 
above ground, and Tommy strolls about whistl- 
ing, unmindful of occasional shells. Such is 
the difference between the two foes. 



(6 



Once More into the Breach " 59 



They told me of a football game that was 
going on one day in a certain field. The Huns 
got wind of it and dropped a few Jack John- 
sons into the game. Tommy stood it a while, 
and then, moving to the other end of the field, 
calmly finished his game. 

The bands play the columns up to the 
trenches and back again. It puts "Cheery-oh" 
into them. I saw a band of Highland pipers 
playing a column of Kilties up toward the 
front line, and I should not like to get in the 
way of a rush from these rawboned, bronzed 
bare-legged Scots. Some talk of the Cana- 
dians as the finest troops in Europe; some, of 
the French chasseurs; but who that has seen 
these various units of splendid fighting men, 
whether Irishmen, Welsh, Scotch, Lancashire, 
French, or territorial, can use any such expres- 
sion of comparison as "the finest fighting 
men?" 

What is to be done with all the ravaged ter- 
ritory when the war is over, is now engaging 
the attention of the French government. Ex- 
pert foresters have been looking over the battle 
grounds of late ; and it is likely that they will 
be planted with trees. They could not safely 
be farmed, on account of unexploded bombs 
and shells, even if the surface could be leveled 



60 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

to anything like a manageable area and the soil 
be restored. 

There is a ridge back of Vimy where thous- 
ands of Frenchmen bravely died, and where 
you see boots with fleshless legs in them; but 
what is yet more problematical for the future, 
there are "duds," or unexploded shells and 
bombs. I picked up a little bomb the size of 
a turkey egg and said to the captain: "Is this 
dangerous ?" 

"I should say it is dangerous. Put it down. 
Last week I saw a doctor in the hospital. He 
had one finger left on one hand and two on the 
other because he picked up a bomb like that." 

So I gingerly laid it down. A few days 
later, as we entered another field, the captain 
reminded us: "I shall have to ask you not to 
touch anything without permission." We, by 
this time, needed no warning. On Vimy 
Ridge I saw a whole box of unexploded hand 
bombs, the size and shape of a turkey egg, 
while ten yards away were five or six live 
aerial torpedoes as big as a six-inch short shell, 
with flanges to guide their flight. Needless to 
say, I walked well around the exhibition and 
touched none of the works of art. 

As we entered upon the shell area at a cer- 
tain point, officers crossing it advised us to 
keep moving; for said they, "The Boche 



(( 



Once More into the Breach " 61 



knows that the King is somewhere hereabouts, 
and if the enemy see any party, they are sure 
to do a bit of strafing." 

The King was at our chateau that day, in 
our absence. We saw the bandstand erected 
on the lawn, and we noted the absence of the 
Count's September-morn type of art on the 
grand staircase. When we came in at night, 
the most delicate and chaste porcelains and 
plaques adorned the walls. 

No officer told us the King had been there. 
We simply felt it. Next day, about noon, my 
curiosity got the better of my discretion, and 
being alone with our captain, I said : "I under- 
stand royalty is somewhere in the neighbor- 
hood." A full minute of silence followed. 
Then he said: "I believe there is a story of 
that kind around." I was sorry I spoke. The 
English papers next week had long stories 
about the King at the front and pictures; but 
my article, written a week or two later, was 
censored of all mention of his majesty. Such 
is the intelligence and personal equation of cen- 
sorship. It is all luck, after all. 

It now merely remains to add that the water 
journey between England and the British front 
is admirably managed. Destroyers deploy on 
either side of the troop ships, and well in 
front, forming a triangle. As soon as we 



62 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

moved off from the dock, we were all ordered 
to put on lifebelts. The boats poured forth a 
thick black screen of smoke behind, blocking 
the open end of the triangle. Then we steam 
ahead as fast as we can go. 

What a pity that all this genius of Great 
Britain, this man power, administration, skill 
and science, invention and ingenuity is forced, 
by the madness of the Hun, into destruction, 
smoke, wholesale death and mud! If all that 
power were turned into construction, what 
could it not accomplish? Splendid as is Lon- 
don, with its massive buildings and monu- 
ments, the British army and the organization 
back of it could build, in a few years, a finer 
and more perfect city than London. God grant 
that it soon be given a chance to build and 
never again be compelled to tear down! 



VII 

THE BRITISH OFFICER— A NEW 
TYPE 

THE old idea of the British officer must 
be changed, even as the old idea of 
the British. Tommy. Time was when 
we used to think of the typical officer, espe- 
cially the subaltern, as a titled, monocled 
young slip of a fop who had little or nothing 
in the way of equipment and training except 
social position, pull or even the money neces- 
sary to purchase a commission, who leaned on 
the breast of a "wet nurse" in the shape of an 
old bronze sergeant-major, put there to tell 
him what to do. That day has gone, ra-a-ther ! 
I remember a verse of an old poem about 
those times: 

The sand of the desert is sodden red, 

Red with the wreck of a square that broke; 
The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead; 

And the regiment's blind with dust and smoke, 
The river of death has brimmed its banks; 

England's far and honor's a name; 
Yet the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks, 
Play up, play up, and play the game ! 
63 



64 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

Now, the old Rugby and Eton notion of the 
officered class must be revised. Echoes of 
the old time, however, still come to us ill 
stories like this, which is a favorite over here : 

A young subaltern was sitting in judgment 
upon a Tommy who had overstayed his leave. 
His sergeant-major was at the officer's elbow 
to prompt him. 

"You should be ashamed, an old soldier like 
you," lectured the young cub. "I ought to 
be especially severe with you. I think I'll give 
you six months C. B." 

Now C. B. means confined to barracks. 
Everything is condensed to letters in the army. 

"Sh-sh-h!" said the sergeant-major. "You 
can't do that, sir. That's altogether too 
much." 

"Well, make it a month then." 

"No, no, sir. You can't confine a man to 
barracks for a month for such a petty offense." 

"No?" said the young lieutenant. "Then 
what do you suggest?" 

"A week's pay, sir; that would be quite 
enough." 

"Very well, then, I give you a week's pay," 
said the young man, and reaching into his 
pocket, he drew out a handful of silver, count- 
ing out the seven shillings, gave them to the 
offender, muttering severely, "See that you 



The British Officer— A New Type 65 

don't let it occur again!'' No, sir, those good 
old days are gone. 

Yet an incident happened to us that showed 
us some remnants of that helplessness in offi- 
cial position. We, with entire innocence, had 
gone into a forbidden area without a pass. 
Nobody challenged us. We spent two days 
going all over that area, riding round like 
kings in a motor car — which, by the way, was 
also unlawful — and seeing all the sights. 
When it was time to leave we went to the 
police station as usual to be checked out. 

"Americans," cried the police sergeant. 
"Where's your pass? How'd you get here? 
What' re you doing here?" He was plainly 
flabbergasted. 

"We just came!" said we blandly, smiling 
sweetly. 

It developed that no civilian had a right to 
go on the boat by which we had gone. Per- 
haps the fact we were in khaki accounted for 
our easy entrance; but we were perfectly in- 
nocent. The sergeant took us to the chief at 
the chief's residence, for it was after hours. 
The chief called in his clerk. Then all held 
a serious, perplexed consultation. They had 
us on their hands; they were not responsible 
for our coming; they did not know what to 
do with us. At first they insisted we were 



66 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

not five feet ten as our identity books de- 
scribed us. We drew ourselves up and swore 
we were. They scrutinized our photos and 
our faces. Satisfied at last that we were the 
very chaps we claimed to be, they once again 
went into committee of the whole and decided 
to let us out of the area, provided we went 
by the proper boat line, and reported ourselves 
upon arrival to the O. C. (commanding ofiicer) 
of the military district. They stamped our 
books and wrote in the proviso, and then, 
evidently relieved, thawed out and we had a 
lovely half hour's chat. 

Next day, upon reaching the mainland, we 
went promptly to the O. C.'s office. Of 
course, they were expecting us. Of course we 
did not see the O. C. in person. But we saw 
a young subaltern and an old clerk. They 
evidently had formed no plan as to what to 
do with us. The subaltern consulted the old 
hand; and the old hand shook his head and 
had nothing to suggest. The whole history 
of our movements was told and retold and 
they looked blank and swore it was impos- 
sible. But there we were, serene flesh and 
blood evidence that it was even so. At last 
they decided to send us on to the civil police, 
with our thumbs in our mouths. Then, seeing 



The British Officer— A New Type 67 

the old clerk could suggest nothing definite, 
the Yankee asserted himself. 

"No you don't," I said, "we are not going 
to chase over to the police and be sent back 
here, or somewhere else. You are going to 
write a writing of some kind, put some kind 
of a rubber stamp on it — we don't care what — 
or else we are going to spend the rest of the 
day quietly in these delightful chambers." So 
in two minutes it was done and the perplexed 
young cub had taken instructions from an out 
and out greenhorn. That is a remnant of old 
days. 

The British officer of to-day has been 
through the mill. No man is supposed to buy 
a commission any longer. Who am I that I 
should say it is not, in 'rare instances, even 
yet done? But taken for all in all, officers to- 
day have come up through every degree of 
training and actual service in the ranks. 
Many have got their stripes for bravery or 
efficiency and all have passed certain set ex- 
aminations. There are no good old days nor 
good old ways left in the army. To be sure, 
likely men are seized upon, college men, spe- 
cialists, even labor contractors and foremen, 
and are prepared for commissions, but they 
must first be common Tommies, in training 
for months, then cadets, with a white band 



68 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

round their caps to indicate that they are 
blossoming into command; then, after ex- 
aminations, full-fledged officers. 

I have not found British officers reserved. 
I have found them modest, sometimes even to 
bashfulness; and about military matters, close 
mouthed as oysters. But, as someone has said, 
Englishmen, if they once open up, are per- 
fectly willing to tell you all about themselves. 
If they like you they will easily open up. If 
they don't like you you might as well talk to 
a bronze statue. To-day the American, if he 
shows himself even halfway modest, is ace 
high among the Allies and they are eager to 
like him and talk to him. 

As for myself I want no more charming 
companion and friend than a cultivated Eng- 
lish officer. They are tact personified in spite 
of certain old American preconceptions. 

One of the most attractive was a Highland 
major, next to whom I sat at dinner one night 
at the chateau in France. He was an attorney 
before the war and wondered how he was ever 
going to settle down to routine office work 
when all was done. He was forty or there- 
abouts, had just married in 19 14, and had in- 
flammatory rheumatism twice in his life, which 
left him with a bad heart. But he volunteered 
on the first day of war through sense of duty 



The British Officer— A New Type 69 

— and got by the doctors undetected. He 
told me how he lay night after night in 
his trench dugout in mud and water, and 
cursed himself for a fool, when all he had to 
do was to go to a surgeon and be transferred 
to base. But he was absurdly healthy all the 
time and seemed to bear a charmed life. Men 
were killed all round him, one night one on 
each side of him, and he was unscathed. He 
had developed a sort of fatalism, as so many 
do in the front lines, which he would admit 
only as a sort of Calvinism. 

"Ah," said he, "it is in the trenches you 
come to see the bottom of men's hearts!" 

That remark gave me my opening. I asked 
him what he meant by seeing to the bot- 
tom of men's hearts. He started, looked me 
between the eyes, and opened up. I thought 
he was hungry for religion, and my surmise 
was correct. He was a man of the world, 
but a churchman. He had not been to church 
for three years; had been to a parade service 
once or twice; expressed disappointment with 
the padre, and had had no religious conversa- 
tion in all that time. 

"Britishers do not talk much about such 
things, although they think much," he ex- 
plained. When he found I was willing to talk 
of religion he would not let go of me all that 



70 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

evening, but led me out under the trees on the 
great lawn, and kept me till late bedtime. I 
shall never forget that splendid Highland 
"mon," and that night. 

War has shaken English conservatism to its 
foundations. It will be long, I hope it will 
be centuries, and so do the English, before 
they relapse again into the satisfaction with 
old things and old ways that if Germany had 
only been wise enough to keep on in her 
conquering commercial path, might have led 
to the peaceful absorption of the British Em- 
pire. These men are now eager for new 
things, new ideas, new speed and efficiency, 
new precedents, or none at all. They are 
actually growing impatient of the old formula : 
"This is good enough for us, because it was 
good enough for our fathers. It always has 
been done this way; it always must be done 
just so." 

Something of the new attitude may be 
found in the contrast of two padres, whom 
one sees to be typical of two classes. One of 
them riding on a bicycle passed a soldier of 
his own regiment who did not salute. The 
padre got down off his wheel, reprimanded 
the man, and made him salute. Of course 
the man did so ; and, of course, he told all his 
mates and, of course, it went through the bat- 



The British Officer— A New Type 71 

talion; and that padre never had any more 
influence among those men. Another big raw- 
boned Scotch chaplain, just back from France, 
had not heard of the new order that all officers 
in public must carry or wear kid gloves. He 
was swinging along, when a little subaltern 
stopped him and cried : 

"I say padre! an officer must wear kid 
gloves, don't you know!" 

"Now look here, sonny," came the rich 
growl from the Highland breast, "you toddle 
along, will you! there's been too much kid 
glove about this war, anyhow !" 

I bet my bottom dollar that padre is not 
without influence in his own battalion. 

The coolness and nonchalance of British 
officers is proverbial. We all have mental 
pictures of them leading their men over the 
parapets. They go with cigarettes in their 
mouths, no weapon in hand but a swagger 
stick, and their lawn tennis manners on. If 
you have such a picture in your mind you 
need not change it. After the early days of 
the war the general staff became more eco- 
nomical of officers. The mortality had been 
far too high, and bravery is now more tem- 
pered with discretion. But there is no dis- 
counting the elegant and easy sang froid of 
these highly mannered Englishmen. I have 



72 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

seen them at it and I know. Particular about 
trifles of conduct? Well, I should say! One 
of them told me without realizing how typical 
he was, how he sat one day in a tram in 
Liverpool and became conscious of the man 
across the aisle gazing at him: 

"You know how some people will do; they 
begin at your boots, travel all the way up and 
finish off at your hat! Beastly annoying, 
don't y'know! Well, I decided to give him 
as good as he sent. So I just laid down my 
paper and I met him with an eye volley 
straight in the nose. A few days later I met 
a naval officer face to face, and although a 
stranger to me, he said he had seen me a few 
days before and had annoyed me by gazing 
at me, that he did not mean to be impertinent, 
that he was only envious. His own uniform 
was not to be done until late in the week. 
Then he told me with great glee that he had 
joined his ship, which was a destroyer, on a 
Wednesday, had put to sea on Friday, got 
in among a nest of U-boats, bagged three, and 
was back on Saturday. I never saw a man 
so happy." 

Nobody knows all the stories of coolness 
and heroism among the naval men. We shall 
not learn them till the war is over, but here 
is one that perhaps the censors will allow to 



The British Officer— A New Type 73 

go by. It was told me by a medical officer 
who was aboard the Franconia when she was 
sunk while acting as a transport. 

"We had five or six naval officers aboard. 
They were sitting in the smoking room — re- 
member the smoking lounge in the old Fran- 
conia ? It was very long, as long as this dining 
room, and twice as broad. They had just 
ordered whisky sodas. Suddenly there was an 
explosion and the steel floor of that smoking 
room just buckled up and burst apart in the 
middle, spilling the whisky sodas into the 
bottom of the ship. One of those officers 
called the steward and said: 

" T ask you to witness, steward, that we 
have paid for these whisky sodas and have not 
had time to drink them.* 

"Then the rascals went below, got on their 
lifebelts, came back again, asked the steward 
for a big sheet of foolscap, wrote out a long, 
'we the undersigned,' setting forth that they 
had ordered six whisky sodas, for which they 
had paid nine shillings, with a sixpence tip, 
and had not been allowed to drink them. 
Therefore they entered a claim against the 
British government for the nine shillings and 
sixpence with accrued interest from date. 
Then they walked in a body up to the bridge 
and handed it to the skipper. The old man 



74 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

told me afterwards he never was so grateful 
to anybody as to these cool young devils for 
the steadying and bucking up influence of their 
impudence." 

It was the same medical officer who told 
me he was on duty at one of the entry ports, 
where the American medical units were com- 
ing through. It was his function among other 
things to welcome arrivals from our country, 
see them through the customs and start them 
on the way to the war office in London. It 
came to be a habit to bring the American 
doctors to the police authorities, and, with the 
assurance that these men were all right, hustle 
them by in a herd. One day he noticed that 
one of these American arrivals could speak 
only poor English. Except, however, for 
wondering a bit, he thought little of the cir- 
cumstance, but sent the man on to London. 
A short time after, word came that the doctor 
with the lame English had not appeared at the 
war office. Then, in about six weeks came 
further word that the man had been caught 
and shot as a spy. 

"Yes," cut in a colonel, sitting near, an 
old stager. "They are daring devils, some of 
these Boches. I have seen them in staff 
officers' uniforms, going about our lines in 
France, giving orders like any brass hat of 



The British Officer— A New Type 75 

them all, and then shot next day at sunrise for 
German spies." 

These officers get "fed up" on war talk. 
They unbend like a loosened bow if an op- 
portunity comes to discuss late art, music or 
old architecture. Some of them, of course, 
have read Httle, or only in certain lines, but 
when you come to the men of culture among 
them, you have to keep your memory working 
lively to keep pace with the rich flow of 
literary reference that ornaments their con- 
versation. Then, after a season of this de- 
tached refreshment, before you are aware, the 
bow is bent again, the old look of thoughtful 
strain comes back, and you know that these 
are the men who have bent their shoulders to 
the task, and will not relax until they have 
seen it through, who are saying to themselves, 
consciously or unconsciously, "This one thing 
I do." 



VIII 
TOMMY ATKINS UP TO DATE 

TO ask what do you think of Tommy 
Atkins is like asking what do you think 
of the Democratic party, or the in- 
dustrial classes, or the late subjects of the 
Czar. It might have been possible, before the 
war, to lump Tommy Atkins in a type, as 
Kipling could do — the type of the British 
regular, just as you could formerly classify 
the American soldier. But that time is now 
gone. There is really no such thing as Tommy 
any more, although we continue to refer to 
him as if there were. The private British 
soldier of to-day is a highly variegated and 
diverse individual. 

If you come into anything like close touch 
with him, get acquainted with large numbers 
of him — you see one will speak as if he were 
a type — you learn from what different origins 
he comes, or more properly they come. 

They may be reduced to outward similarity 
by the unvarying khaki; just as men would 
be so reduced if they were stripped of all 

76 



Tommy Atkins up to Date 77 

clothing; but, within, by birth, training, en- 
vironment, they differ all up and down the 
gamut of British society. 

An incident, told me by an officer, will ad- 
mirably illustrate this. A woman in a certain 
town in the south was told by a sergeant- 
major that three men were to be billeted in 
her house. 

"But I will not have them!" indignantly 
cried the "lady of the house." 

"You'll have to, madam," softly responded 
the sergeant. 

"What, three common Tommies in my 
house ! It's an outrage ; I'll not have it !" 

"It's orders, madam, and the men will be 
here at 5 o'clock to-day." 

The sergeant left her, fuming and fussing. 
At the appointed hour the men came; but the 
"lady" would have nothing personally to do 
with them. They were turned over to the 
maids, ate in the kitchen, slept in the attic or 
the barn; they "jolly well" enjoyed them- 
selves, too, for the several days of their stay 
in the company of the maids. 

When the time came to depart they asked 
to see their hostess, as they had not glimpsed 
her face and were desirous of thanking her 
for her hospitality. She grudgingly consented 
to tell them good-by, although she would not 



78 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

tell them how do you do. When they were 
shown into the presence of the graven image, 
one handed her his card, while expressing his 
gratitude, and it read: "Sir James Blank." 
Another did the like, and it was: "Rufus 
MacDonald, Bart," we'll say. The third was 
the sixth son of Lord So-and-So, and wore 
the title of "Hon." To say that the rank- 
loving woman ate her bread in tears for weeks 
to come is to put it mildly. 

Here's another good illustration of the di- 
versities of soldierly origin, told me by the 
padre who had had part in the conversation. 

"How do you like your hutmates, me mon ?" 
says the padre. "Me mon" in this case hap- 
pened to be Sir Angus MacAngus of Angus, 
let us say. 

"O, they'll do," answered the Scotch noble- 
man, for this nobleman was a real one. 
"Let's see, there's the barrister from Glasgo', 
he's keen, sir. There's the costermonger from 
Edinboro', he's no bad sort. There's the pro- 
fessor from Aberdeen; the merchant, the 
chartered accountant, and the cotter from up 
Inverness way. They'll do, sir, fair enough; 
they'll do." 

There were a whole string of others, but I 
have exhausted my knowledge of Scotch towns 
and localities, as well as occupations; and I 



Tommy Atkins up to Date 79 

do not write shorthand, so could not take 
down the padre's words as he told me the 
story. My geography of a Scottish battalion 
is no doubt badly upset, as it is. Anyway, 
some notion is given you of the pull made 
upon all the men of the empire to supply the 
rank and file. 

Many men entirely capable of becoming 
officers prefer to remain privates for a variety 
of reasons. Thus, a private takes no respon- 
sibility. He is looked after, instead of being 
compelled to look after anybody. His danger 
is not so great as that of an officer who must 
be the first over the top in a charge. Perhaps 
not many men of the highest grade of hero- 
ism, you say, would be actuated by this latter 
motive, and yet, after all, a man who be- 
comes a soldier of any rank has made the 
supreme sacrifice. He offers his life, whether 
it is taken or not; he gives his all; it is not 
needful to expect all of them to go beyond. 

I sat for some days at table with a fine, 
square built Canadian officer. At last I 
learned his history. He was a theological 
graduate of McGill University. He enlisted 
as a stretcher bearer in a medical unit, thinking 
he could there do the most good and the least 
harm. 

He did nothing but carry stretchers, which 



80 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

requires tremendous physical vigor and endur- 
ance, men having to hurry at times to escape 
shell fire. They must often set a heavy car 
on rails, double quick. They must go up 
through the barrage. Men's legs finally give 
way in this work, with a sort of rheumatism. 
There is intense pain for two weeks, then 
they can hardly walk. They often hugged 
walls in shell fire, so a shell would have to 
pierce two or three walls before reaching 
them. He asked for some work that would 
give him a chance for study. The colonel 
said "Chaplain?" "No, I'd rather be in a 
combatant unit." He felt that he could do 
more good there. 

He was assigned to the Royal Garrison 
Artillery School for Officers and has been in 
London ten months studying. He was never 
wounded. He thinks war deepens religious 
life and sobers men. 

"Men who've been out to France don't 
laugh easily. Jokes must be good to make 
them laugh," said he. I know this to be true 
from sad experience with some of my own. 

There is scarcely a battalion but has a cor- 
poral or a private who was organist of a 
great church, an artist of distinction, a singer 
or a writer, and none without men who in 
private life had known the great universities, 



Tommy Atkins up to Date 81 

or the great commercial houses, or the big 
politics of the nation. 

I could name you several deathless books 
that have fallen from the hands of young men 
who now sleep beside the Somme, or Vimy 
Ridge, or Ypres ; and I have shaken the hands 
that will yet pen great poetry and plays, or 
paint great pictures, or compose great sym- 
phonies if they live, which may God grant. 

Perhaps among the Colonials, that is the 
troops from Canada, Australia, New Zealand 
and the overseas dominions of Great Britain 
in general, are to be found the strangest tricks 
of fate in upsetting ante-bellum social condi- 
tions. Thus an Australian officer told me of 
a young subaltern who was compelled to fix 
a penalty for a private soldier under him. 
The soldier had stayed out of barracks beyond 
his allotted leave. Said the young man: 

"I don't know what to do except to dock 
you a month's pay. A month's pay, then, it 
is!" 

In private life that common soldier is the em- 
ployer of the young subaltern and is holding 
the job for him until the war is done. 

Another story is on everybody's lips here 
about an Australian colonel who addressed his 
battalion before a certain famous review and 
said, among other things: 



82 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

"Now, men, do try and behave well to-day 
and do yourselves and me credit, and, for 
God's sake, don't let anybody forget and call 
me Bill!" 

This democratic spirit of the Colonials is 
a great scandal to the ideas of discipline 
cherished by the English army. No private 
in England may speak to an officer, in any 
circumstances; and I saw in a daily paper 
where a certain officer had been court-mar- 
tialed for dining with one of his men. The 
plea was guilty and the defense was that in 
private life the common soldier was a man 
of good social position, but this fact will not 
avert the penalty. 

Officers can only travel first class on rail- 
ways and privates only third. A young man 
complained to me that he and his brother, who 
was an officer, could not travel together when 
coming home from France on leave, and could 
not speak to each other in public. This 
rigidity is somewhat relaxed in the stress of 
the immediate front; but tightens again as the 
danger passes; and it is beyond doubt also 
wise, for a variety of reasons which cannot 
here be set forth. It is enough to say that 
only iron discipline can avoid terrible loss of 
life when men are charging slowly forward 
behind a barrage of fire. Colonial lack of 



Tommy Atkins up to Date 83 

discipline at first cost more than one trench, 
more than one gun, and thousands of lives; 
but all that has now been remedied, and the 
men of Canada and of Australia have won 
undying fame at Vimy and Messines not only 
for bravery but for disciplined self control. 

No doubt our American militia will be 
found to err on the democratic side when they 
come across; and one who has seen something 
of the war can only exhort them to fall in 
as soon as possible with the rigid ideas of 
discipline in the British army. To obey, and 
obey rigidly and to the letter, will save losses 
in the long run. It is not needful to lose one's 
personality and become an automaton like the 
boche, as the individual initiative and heroism 
of the British has shown, times out of mind; 
but it is needful to obey, not to do more than 
one is told and never to go further than one 
is ordered. 

I am here reminded of the word of an old 
French poilu who was guarding German 
prisoners when we passed the spot, where they 
were at work upon the roads. We said: 

"Do any of them ever escape?" 

"Never," said the old soldier. "They are 
afraid to escape. They know the French 
women would cut their throats. Oh, they are 
much afraid of our French women." 



84 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

And is there not cause? 

"Are they contented ? Are they good work- 
ers?" asked we. 

"Contented? To be sure," said he. "Are 
they not slaves?" 

Concerning the free democracy of the 
Colonial troops I heard a good story the other 
night at the chateau, which the officer who 
told it said he had from General Birdwood, 
himself, commander-in-chief of the Australian 
forces. It was a rainy night, and the general, 
his insignia all covered with waterproofs, 
came upon one of his men leaning against a 
wall, his rifle ten or twelve feet away. Said 
the general: 

"What are you doing here, my man?" 

"Fm the bally sentinel, sir," said the man. 
"And who the hell are you?" 

"I'm the bally general," answered Bird- 
wood. 

"Well," said the soldier gathering his great 
length and breadth together leisurely. "Wait 
till I get me gun and I'll salute a bally gen- 
eral!" 

"Birdie," as his men fondly term him, was 
very gleeful over the story. I give it not on 
my own authority, but that of the officer. 

The Australian Tommy reminds me of the 
Texas or Colorado cowpuncher of a genera- 



Tommy Atkins up to Date 85 

tion ago, long, brown, angular, more or less 
loose jointed and careless of gait, appearance 
and manner. His field hat, jauntily turned up 
at the side, and pinned with a bronze sun- 
burst, is made, I am told, of rabbits' fur, re- 
duced to felt by a certain pneumatic pressure. 
I closely examined the texture, and it seemed 
as fine and tough as the felt in an American 
army Stetson. The cavalry carry ostrich 
plumes in the turned up side of the hat brim. 

The New Zealand troops, wearing field hats 
just like our own, peaked at the top, and with 
a red hat band instead of our cord, seem to 
me to possess a certain lithe grace of carriage 
and distinction of countenance, all their own. 
They, too, are tall, slender fellows, without 
the awkwardness of the Australian, or the 
beef of the English. They remind me of 
Harvard and Yale track teams done up in 
khaki. You would think them born aristo- 
crats, from their cleanly chiseled features and 
well-set-up forms. I find, too, that others have 
received the same impression of them. 

As for the Canadians, they are our close 
neighbors, and we know them well in America. 
Their discipline and their democracy arc pretty 
much like our own. One of their generals 
was a wholesale grocer before the war; an- 
other was a young attorney, who came up 



86 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

through the ranks. Their officers were largely 
business and professional men, commercial 
travelers and clerks. They are the type of 
men in our American militia; and what the 
Canadians did, like the Princess Pat's, at 
Ypres — there are only six or seven of them 
now left in active service — or the long sweep- 
ing line of them at Vimy Ridge, that can our 
own lads do in — well, never mind the place 
to which the railway is a-building in France. 

So, you see, the British Tommy, like woman, 
has an infinite variety. And his spirit ! Well, 
it is like that of John Brown, which goes 
marching on, with a song. How they sing! 
Grave faced fellows they are at times; pain 
of wounds is written upon their countenances, 
in wheel-chairs, on crutches; the burden of 
a great task reveals itself in a set look in the 
eyes of perfectly healthy men on march, or 
looking out from trench or high observatory; 
but start them singing in a hut or by a road- 
side, or on the way down to the transport at 
the quay and — how they sing ! 

The German used to sing. "Deutschland 
Ueber Alles" once rang over these fields and 
through these woods, and "Die Wacht am 
Rhine" and "Ein Feste Burg"; but now, sad 
to relate, because of the heartlessness of their 
rulers, the disregard of humble human life, 



Tommy Atkins up to Date 87 

the song is crushed out of the heart of song- 
loving Germany. 

The London cockney is the most amusing 
man in the service, always witty and bright, 
effervescent, bubbling with repartee ; and when 
the cockney is quite young and gathered to- 
gether by the hundreds in a hut, as at a certain 
camp I know, he is like a storm of mirth. 
One such fellow, a costermonger, was selling 
strawberries in the streets the other day, dur- 
ing the air raid. He never stopped crying his 
wares, but we heard him add a Hne to his 
song : 

Strawberries! Strawberries! Fresh and red! 

May as well die with a sweet tooth in your head! 

At a certain convalescent camp in France, 
where are thousands of men, I saw them work- 
ing at their trades. Some were bootmakers, 
mending what we call shoes ; tailors were over- 
hauling clothing; one fine featured young 
chap, who looked to me like an artist or a 
Greek scholar of Cambridge, blushed when 
he saw me watching how he darned socks, 
then grinned back at me; tinners were making 
things out of old biscuit cans; carpenters, 
making furniture out of packing cases; others 
were melting down the solder from waste tins. 
I saw a poster in the theater dining room — 



88 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

"The Bijou" — which from memory I repro- 
duce: 

Competition Friday night. Every man do the thing 
he does best, as well as he can do it. Here is a chance 
for artists, artistes and would be artists. Do your 
best for the sake of Yourself. 



On the least encouragement, Tommy brings 
out the photographs of wife, children or sweet- 
heart to show you. A man cannot be all 
wrong, so long as he does this. Take him for 
all in all, the British Tommy is surely a man! 
There is no great bin of apples but has its 
speckled ones; yet, by and large, I mean, the 
British army compels admiration in any ob- 
server who delights in looking upon real men. 
We shall not see its like again, you and I; 
for when this war is done, completely done, 
that vast army will melt back into a nation 
once more, a nation of clerks and shopkeepers, 
scholars and artists, manufacturers and sailors, 
parliamentarians and colonizers, while there is 
rung in, let us trust, the thousand years of 
peace. 



IX 

TWO UNDECORATED HEROES 

I TALKED for hours, recently, with two 
heroes who will never wear a decora- 
tion! Indeed, I talk with heroes every 
day. Some are lads of eighteen and twenty, 
who tell me how they went over the top; how 
they felt when their bayonets first pierced 
German breasts — "a bit shaky, sir, yes, sir'*; 
how they got ''theirs" from a bit of shell, 
shrapnel, or machine gun ball; how they lay 
three days and nights in a shell hole, or 
crawled back far enough for comrades to find 
them; how they are "quite all right now, sir," 
and eager to get back to France, or "unfit for 
active service" and are set to guarding German 
prisoners. 

A young Virginian named Burke, red 
headed and eighteen, carried two gold stripes 
on his arm. The first is for a wound through 
the shoulder and the second through the 
thigh. 

"I'm going back next week, sir," he said, 
"and is there any way I could get transferred 
to the American army?" 

89 



90 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

The handsomest woman we have met in 
England opened conversation with three of us 
the other day, in a railway carriage, and bit 
by bit we learned her story. 

"My husband was killed three years ago. 
All the men I know have been killed. Nobody 
in our sphere of life is left. My little boy 
is the last of his name; he will inherit that 
great place yonder. But we can no longer 
bear it in England. We shall go to the colo- 
nies. I am under thirty, but life to me is 
done." 

She is a superb woman, a Juno. There was 
no tear, no heroics, no melodramatics. It 
tugged at our hearts. 

Another incident I would not have believed, 
if told to me by another. Some of us went 
with "Captain Peg" to a cinema. 

"Ah, there are friends of mine," said he. 
"How do you do?" bowing to them. "That 

is Mrs. , and her daughter. She lost 

three sons in France, and has another at the 
front." 

They were showing war films — the siege of 
Antwerp. It was said the films had been taken 
at great risk, by the consent of the military 
authorities. By and by, a young officer in a 
trench turned toward the camera and smiled. 
He was life size, and very handsome. 



Two Undecorated Heroes 91 

"Herbert, oh, my Herbert!" Mrs. 



behind us, was standing, her hands out- 
stretched towards the screen. Then a shell 
came, or a mine, and Herbert was blown 
into bits. The mother fell fainting. She had 
known her son was dead, but never how he 
died. Captain Peg gathered her in his arms 
and bore her out. 

Now, for the two heroes. The firs^ we 

met in an officers' training camp at G 

Park — the beautiful private grounds of an 
English mansion. There were lads with down 
on their chins, the flush of youth and health 
on their cheeks. They were college men for 
the most part. Some were fine musicians. 
Some were men over thirty who had been 
making as much as $25,000 and $30,000 a 
year as managers in "the city." All now were 
in the rough khaki ! There was a viscount or 
two, sons of dukes and earls, and of M. P.'s, 
double honor men at Oxford or Cambridge. 

"Yes, my father," said one, modestly, yet 
with pride, "was with Mr. Balfour's commis- 
sion to America. He is a member of Parlia- 
ment and quite a speaker. You see, sir, Mr. 
Balfour is no longer young, and must have 
someone to help him with the talking." 

It was the best audience I had spoken to 
in England, and I enjoyed my address im- 



92 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

mensely, whether anybody else had a good 
time or not. I could imagine myself talking 
to Missouri University cadets, my own lads 
among them. 

All this time I paid little heed to a small 
man in civilian dress in a dim corner. Then 
the secretary, Mr. Bull, informed me that Mr. 
Dyer was going back to town by our train. 

"He is a great Y. M. man. He heard I 
was perplexed about my lighting system for 
this hut and came out to help me. He has a 
hut of his own in Camberwell — the finest in 
England. You will enjoy talking with him.'' 

"Ay, ay," thought I. "He will bore me all 
the way in. He must be one of the unco' 
guid." 

He was in reality, a heavily charged car- 
bonated bottle. I lazily pulled the cork when 
we were in the compartment and he effer- 
vesced. We sat up and took notice, interject- 
ing a question here and there. 

"Yes, sir, Fm a business man. I work 
twelve hours a day. Furniture is my line. 
Thirty-three years in Camberwell Road. 
When the war came I built a hut o' me own 
on Camberwell Green, just across from my 
place. Oh, yes, it took some work to get the 
consent of the council; it took eighteen months. 
I gathered twelve thousand signatures and 



Two Undecorated Heroes 93 

addressed many public meetings. Yes, I work 
three nights a week at Victoria Station." 

"Three nights — you mean all night, and then 
back to business " 

"Yes, sir, all night, and a bite of break- 
fast, then back to business." 

"But, man, you'll kill yourself !" 

"What's the odds? Didn't ye say in your 
address, a few years more or a few years less, 
what odds?" 

Here he ran his hands through his thick, 
snow-white hair. 

"Three years ago this was black as the 
crow; and I'm fifty-five. But the lads are 
dying for me and mine. I've a lad at the 
front now — flying corps. Once I had three. 
Now only the one." 

"What do you do all the night?" 

"I go after the lads. There are twenty 
thousand a night that come into the town, 
straight from the trenches or elsewhere. The 
same people are waiting to get them, sharks, 
they are, and I can pick one out of their 
clutches now and again. When I see a woman 
of the town nab one I go up and say, 'Bad 
company, old chap.' Then he may say, 'What 
the hell is it to you?' I've been knocked 
down three times; but sometimes I get him, 
give the girl some money and take him to my 



94 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

hut, a bath and a clean, nice bed. Sometimes 
I get a drunk one — the police turn him over 
to me. There was a mine sweeper, and his 
wife and children waitin' for him'* — but the 
story is too long. Enough to say the mine 
sweeper went home sober for his holiday, 
stayed sober and came back with a great 
bouquet of coarse flowers from the "missus." 
He was lost at sea next trip. 

"Then there was a lad dog-tired, so tired 
he could hardly speak, straight from the 
trenches. He was filthy. He came with me 
half asleep. I took off his clothes m'self. 
His feet were blistered. I gave him his bath 
and put him in clean night-clothes and between 
clean sheets. I took his wallet and found 
ninety-five pounds in it! 

"Then I found his father's address and rang 
him up on the telephone. It was past mid- 
night, and he cursed me when he came to the 
'phone. I told him I had his son. Then there 
was a pause. He said he'd be there in half 
an hour. The big motor rolled up, and the 
man came in. He was a stock broker, and 
he and his lad had not spoken for some years. 
The boy had run through half his fortune. 
He came in and stood by the little bed, and 
cried ; then he bent down and kissed the sleep- 
ing boy, and went away. I arranged for them 
to meet next morning at ten." 



Two TJndecorated Heroes 95 

There is more to the story, but the lad is 
an officer now in France, an honor to his 
father. 

Story after story poured from the lips of 
the little white-haired man, as we rolled up 
to London. Our throats were drawn and 
ached. 

**Good night, gentlemen, and will you come 
and see my hut, some time, in Camberwell?" 

"By Jove, old man, you can't shake us. 
We're going straight to your darned old hut, 
if it takes all night." 

We drove through the dark streets, the 
little man beaming and pointing out all the 
spots immortalized by Dickens, such as Mar- 
shalsea Prison, Blackman's Road and Shake- 
speare's first dwelling in London and the like. 
He was certainly up on old London. 

We had expected disappointment in the hut ; 
but there it stood, flashing out in the night, 
like an officers' club. Indeed it looked like an 
officers' club within. 

"This is the lady manageress," said Mr. 
Dyer, introducing us, and a handsome lady 
smiled and bowed. "This is Alderman So- 
and-so." Then beneath his breath, "Yonder 

is the Duchess of ." The little man 

was all swelled up with innocent pride. There 
were four handsome billiard tables in apple 
pie order, in a room all to themselves. There 



96 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

was a writing room that would do credit to a 
seaside hotel. There were great easy chairs, 
dainty hangings and tasty crockery. 

There were well chosen pictures everywhere. 
It was midnight, and the place was full of 
Tommies. I tell you, it was as handsome as an 
officers* club. Then there were the lavatories 
and showers. We tiptoed into the dormitory 
— a hundred and seventy-five beds, as clean 
and artistic as your boy's bed at home, the 
linen all changed every day and the price six- 
pence a night. For a little more a lad may 
have a neat little room alone. 

Then we walked out in the "tea garden'* in 
Camberwell Green, under the moon. 

"It's fine to serve tea in, in summer, now, 
isn't it, sir? There is but one thing more 
I want to make the place complete. I shall 
build a room just here, with a bow window 
full of glass, for the sun to come in; where 
husbands and wives, fathers and sons may 
meet, to talk alone. You know they do get 
estranged, when separated in the war, and they 
must talk it out alone to get set right, you 
know, sir." 

"Have you brought husbands and wives to- 
gether again?" 

"Oh, time and again sir. Now there 
was " 



Two Undecorated Heroes 97 

"Look here, Mr. Dyer, is this the night 
you're to stay up all night?" 

"No, to-morrow night." 

"Then, you go home and go to bed. You 
shan't stand 'gassing' to us all night." 

He will never wear a decoration — in this 
life, at least. 

The other hero is a Scotch Presbyterian 
chaplain. Captain Robertson. He stands six 
feet and an inch in his stockings, is built like 
a North American Indian, with a face by 
Phidias or Praxiteles. He is just from a hos- 
pital, convalescent from wounds received in 
France. It was dim twilight in the corner of 
the hut where we sat very close, eye to eye, 
and I got his story out of him, in the clean- 
cut English, almost American English, char- 
acteristic of the cultivated Scot. 

"Ah, 'tis great experience! I am almost fit 
to go back — breathing is still a bit bad. I 
don't know if they will let me go back. Yes, 
I was in a transverse, coming back from the 
front line trenches — ^yes, I was in the front 
line every day — when the shell got me. 

"I did not think at first I was hurt, but felt 
a strange sense of exhilaration. My left arm, 
though, was twisted clear around in front of 
me and quite useless. Still I thought it was 
but shock. I walked on, feeling no pain, to the 



98 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

dressing dugout. The doctor asked me what 
was the matter, as I looked pale. I told him 
I supposed I was hit. They cut off my tunic, 
and I was bleeding profusely in the chest and 
under the arm, which was broken here and 
here. 

"A large piece of shell had cut through my 
check book, which was just beneath my heart, 
and penetrated the side. If the check book had 
not been there it might really have been seri- 
ous. I fainted by the by. They operated. 
I had ever so long in the hospital. Ah, yes; 
you never know brotherhood except in the 
danger and in the hospital. Brotherhood — 
that is the great discovery of this war. 

"Another time, in the town of A , in 

the ruins of the cathedral, I had a marvelous 
escape. I took refuge from the shelling, as 
I was passing on the street, and one burst 
fifteen yards away; they kill at thirty. Frag- 
ments whizzed past my ears and I was covered 
with debris. It was the Almighty. We had 
called a service for that day and had sung 
only a few hymns, prayed, and I had begun 
to preach when the major stepped up to me 
saying: 

" *It is too dangerous, captain. We must 
disperse the men.' 

" 'Righto !' said I, though I had begun to 



Two Undecorated Heroes 99 

forget to be afraid in the interest in my 
sermon. Wonderful how interesting a man's 
sermon becomes to himself! 

"Oh, yes, in the trenches every day and all 
day, visiting the men. One night an officer 
said to me: 

" 'Let's crawl across No Man's Land, only 
ninety yards, and see the Hun at home.' 

"'What's the good of being a fool?' said 
I. But we went. We peeped down into the 
trench, but never a Boche was in sight. 

"I was saying the burial service once in a 
cemetery — just a passage or two from the 
Good Book, d'ye know, and a prayer. A few 
soldier lads were there. Shells were whizzing 
over all the time. Suddenly we heard the loud 
whirr of aircraft and machine guns. The lads 
scattered crying: 'She's coming down in 
flames. Run ! Run !' 

"I opened my eyes and looked up. There 
was a plane, all afire, coming straight down 
at my head. I was glued to the spot. Then, 
just above me, she veered off with the wind, 
and fell fifty yards away. Ah, yes, it was the 
Almighty! It burned a long time; yes, it 
was our own. When the flames had done, 
there was naught of the two brave lads but 
two shriveled mummies. It is a great experi- 
ence, a great life. I hope to go back." 



X 

BRITISH ARE BRAVE IN SORROW 

THE iron has certainly pierce4 the heart 
of British homes, and is entering 
deeper and deeper every day; but 
braver and more determined people do not 
live. The time is at hand when American 
homes may look forward to the same destiny. 
Daily, almost hourly, I have been brought into 
touch with the sorrows of British hearts, and 
the heroism. Perhaps some of their stories 
may strike responsive chords in American 
breasts and tune them for the same high cour- 
age. 

He was a tall bearded Australian. We were 
sitting together, after breakfast, in the 
"lounge" of a London hotel. He was in the 
uniform of an officer of the Red Cross. We 
fell into conversation, and I naturally called 
him "doctor." 

"No," said he, "I am not a physician, but 
a plain business man." Then he told me how 
it all came about. His son was in the army, 
had been wounded at the Dardanelles ; and the 

100 



British are Brave in Sorrow 101 

father had come all the way to watch over 
him. The lad recovered, rejoined his bat- 
talion and was killed at the Somme. "Then," 
said the father, "there was nothing for me to 
do but to stay here. Oh, yes, I have another 
son, and a daughter, but why should I go 
back? He was all in all to me, my comrade, 
my best friend. He was such a cheery, ami- 
able boy, and he loved me as a companion 
better than any other. We were more like 
brothers. So I joined up, in the medical 
corps, to do what I could among the wounded 
lads in the hospitals." Then we compared 
photographs of our sons, a very common pro- 
cedure over here. 

I fell to thinking, though I did not tell him 
of it, about two Australian boys I had seen 
on the battlefield of the Somme, about a 
quarter of a mile from the famous sugar 
factory. They were busy about something at 
the side of the crater filled road. They hailed 
us and told us it was no good trying to get 
through with our motor, so we alighted and 
went over to talk with them. Then we saw 
what they were engaged upon. It was a slab 
of sandstone ; and they were carving with their 
jack-knives, in beautiful regular letters an 
"in memoriam" for a comrade whose young 
head lay somewhere in the storm-tossed earth 



102 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

close at hand. Officers and all, we stood there 
silent, rather awestruck; and, though we said 
nothing, afterwards our thoughts all went back 
to that far away shore where only a few 
months before, no doubt, for these soldiers 
were beardless boys, they had played in field 
and forest, in country lane, or rolling surf, 
or city street, with that other boy hero, who 
lay asleep under the fast greening earth. Yes, 
birds sing over those battlefields. I heard 
skylark and thrush above that young lad's 
grave. I heard them and saw them, even, in 
the smoke and thunder of the guns. 

There was a young lad at work in the 
kitchen of the Y. M. C. A. canteen. He was 
in "civics," but there were gold stripes on his 
sleeve, the little gold stripes that tell the story 
of deep danger and suffering. They are not 
given unless the wound puts one into hospital 
for a prolonged stay. A closer glance betrayed 
the scars in face and neck; but he was such 
a slip of a boy to be a veteran, disabled, unfit. 
I made inquiries and found he was not yet 
seventeen. He had enlisted in the navy, expect- 
ing, of course, to be sent to sea ; but in the press 
of affairs and the shortage of men, marines 
were sent into the trenches and he was among 
them. He got his, and got it badly. He was 
recovering, however, and, anxious to serve, 



British are Brave in Sorrow 103 

was at work washing cups and cooking until 
the time came when he could go back. They 
will not, of course, let him go again into 
trench work until he is nineteen. 

"They need such a lot of loving," said a 
fat, middle aged matron in a hospital to me, 
half apologetically, the other evening as she 
came bustling a bit late into the canteen. 
''You see, some of these lads have never been 
away from home before; and there is a world 
of love in their homes; we don't realize, I 
think, how, in the poorer homes, there is so 
much love. I sometimes think the poorer they 
are the more there is. Anyway, they need a 
lot, and I try to give it to them." 

Most of these had come back from Salonika, 
Egypt, East Africa, with fevers, especially 
malaria. Some had been in hospitals months, 
nearly or quite a year. They did their best 
to sing and cheer, but their faces were drawn 
and yellow and their brows damp. One lad 
looked infinitely sad in the second row. I 
could not make him out. Then they told me 
that he was deaf from fever, and had been 
so for months. Of course, he could not sing 
and he would shake his head now and then 
and wrinkle his forehead. One fine young 
Canadian, with hollow cheeks, I was talking 
to, and asked him to come and sit nearer the 



104 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

front. He shook his head and smiled and 
pointed to the window. His heart goes back 
on him and he needed air. 

One night, in a hospital, while the singing 
was most uproarious, I noticed a big, burly 
patient take a smaller comrade on his back 
and carry him out. Afterwards the nurses 
said the smaller one had had all the fun he 
could stand for the present. He was going hot 
and cold by turns, and chilling. Was he shot 
through the legs or spine? Oh, no, no wound 
at all, only shell-shock ; but he could not walk, 
hardly speak. Months some of them are like 
that, no wound, but loss of memory, speech, 
hearing, even motion of any kind sometimes. 

On a Sunday night I was speaking in a 
suburban chapel, in London, when I saw a 
young soldier lying flat in a long basket upon 
wheels rolled up beside the pulpit. By and 
by it was announced that Private So-and-So 
would sing. A little plain woman, his wife, 
they told me, stepped up to the recumbent 
boy — he was no more than a boy — raised him 
to a sitting posture, put pillows at his back and 
sat down at the piano. Then he sang in a 
sweet, clear tenor an old gospel song, simple 
and unostentatious, "And I shall See Him 
Face to Face." They afterwards told me a 
machine gun ball had lodged in his spine; 



British are Brave in Sorrow 105 

surgeons all feared to operate. He was para- 
lyzed from the waist down. One surgeon said 
if the boy was willing he would take a chance. 
When he talked with the patient the latter 
said, "Well, doctor, I am not in your hands, 
but the good God's. Do as you think best." 
The bullet was removed, but whether the lad 
will ever walk again nobody knows except 
Him in whose hands he is. 

An old dock laborer, his hair white as snow, 
took me aside the other day after a meeting 
at a certain port. I had made some reference 
to our sons. He only wanted to tell me about 
his own, his only boy, who lay out yonder 
at Bethune. "His grave is marked, too. My 
nephew saw it. I shall go there, of course, 
when the war is done. I'd a great deal rather 
be lying there now in his place if I could. 
Reconciled? Oh, yes, sir, I'm growing recon- 
ciled. After all, it was a noble death for the 
boy, and he'll miss all the trouble of this world. 
He went away so happy and brave." Every- 
where I see something of that father love that 
would rather take the son's place if it could. 
Much is said about mother love, and it is quite 
the most beautiful thing in the world, but 
there is something to be said, too, for father 
love, for it has little to say for itself. 

In a home of wealth and luxury, we sat 



106 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

talking, when a man of sixty made the first 
reference to his boy. I was wondering if 
there were any sons. I saw two daughters. 
When it came it was about like this: "That 
was before Harry was killed." There was an 
involuntary movement of hand to forehead, 
and a wrinkling across the brow, then the con- 
versation went on. 

Another little short Scotchman with white 
mustache, a manager in a great shell factory, 
was showing us through. By and by, when 
he and I were alone, some reference to sons 
fell from my lips. "Ay," said he quickly, "I 
have a son out there, he is under the ground — 
this way gentlemen!" 

Do not think, however, that they are all 
under the ground. One lovely white-haired 
woman in a canteen hut told me of five sons 
she has given to her country. All have been 
in the service. One, the youngest, lost his 
right arm, the eldest is a mighty pilot in the 
flying corps. "Oh, yes, I'm proud of him. 
He is a flight commander, yes, captain is his 
rank. He was home on leave last week. He 
has just shot down his sixth plane and killed 
the eighth Hun. He is a fine lad!" 

Another woman in a neighboring hut told 
how her son had had his twenty-second opera- 
tion, and she felt sure he would now get well. 



British are Brave in Sorrow 107 

She had just been to see him in the hospital, 
on the South Coast. "He was an officer, you 
see; and was hit in the leg below the knee. 
His servant tried to carry him back to the 
trenches, when the Germans saw them and 
turned a machine gun on them. The servant 
was killed and my son received nine bullets 
in his back. Then he lay out five days and 
five nights in a shell hole." I have known of 
wounded men lying out six days, subsisting 
on their emergency rations of hard tack and 
bully beef and a canteen of water. These long 
waits for help are not at all uncommon. Then 
she continued: "Oh, no, it was not the 
wounds in his back that gave all the trouble. 
They easily got those bullets out, but it was 
the leg. Gangrene set in and they have been 
amputating a little more and a little more, and 
it seemed as if they could never check it. 
Really, I believe a little American nurse saved 
him, for after the last operation, as the doctors 
stood about, she said, *If this was out in 
France they'd use so and so.' What's that?' 
said the chief surgeon, sharply. She repeated 
her remark. The surgeon said he'd never 
heard of it, asked if she had the formula and 
knew how to use it. She did, 'and my son has 
been improving right along.' " 

I'm sure I don't know whose conduct was 



108 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

the finer in this case, the nurse's or the doc- 
tor's. 

All the heroes are not in the army, either. 
I saw one four years old, or thereabouts, 
standing by the trainside with his mother the 
other day. Dad was already in his seat and 
his kit was in the rack, and the train was about 
to bear him back to the front. The mother 
was tearless and brave, as every one of these 
English women are, but it was just a bit too 
much for the little four-year-old. He would 
look at his dad, then look away and choke 
and swallow, and catch the sob half-way be- 
tween breast and throat. He would make be- 
lieve to be interested in baggage trucks and 
passing people, and his hand worked con- 
vulsively in his mother's, but he simply could 
not look into that compartment and play the 
man, so he did not trust himself to look. I 
have seen no finer bravery and self-control in 
this brave island. 

A tall, red-headed, freckled, angular young 
fellow whispered in my ear the other night as 
the men filed by to shake hands. The gold 
stripes were on his arm, two of them, though 
evidently he was fit again, built like a race 
horse. This is what he whispered: 

"I had made up my mind, sir, to pop off" 
— ^vernacular for suicide — "I've been out to 



British are Brave in Sorrow 109 

France twice, and hit twice; now I'm about 
ready to go again, and I thought I couldn't 
stand it; but after this meeting Tve decided 
to stick. Good-night!" 

He hurried away in the crowd. You cannot 
tell by the faces of these men where the sen- 
sitive spots are. Some that look most unre- 
sponsive have the livest and most quivering 
hearts, so it never does to run the risk of a 
cold and formal greeting ; better give every one 
of them a God bless you, and God be with 
you, or good luck, my son. You never know 
which one needs it most. 

Now the last little story of this kind is the 
tale of a twilight in a little room back of a 
hut. The old man, leader of that hut, was 
seventy-five if a day. Twilights come late in 
England in the summertime, even as they come 
late in life, sometimes. We two were alone, 
and he brought out his little treasures, all he 
has. One was a photograph in a frame of 
a fair-haired, open faced, handsome youth. 
"My son," said he. Someone else told me 
the mother had died from the shock when the 
boy was killed. "My only son. Nothing was 
ever found of him, except the pocket of his 
tunic, and the Testament that was in it. See 
where the shell cut the book and marked this 
passage ?" 



110 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

Then he drew out his spectacles to examine 
it again. *'You see, I only got this pocket 
and Testament last week." Sure enough, the 
fragment of shell had torn through and 
marked, "Henceforth there is laid up for you 
a crown of righteousness which the King, the 
righteous judge, shall give you." I saw those 
same words in the window of a great cathedral 
to-day, under the figure of Chinese Gordon, 
the most daring and most selfless Englishman 
in modern history. 

It was little that the shell should have 
marked this one particular passage or any one 
of a hundred others. The old man would 
have found something significant somewhere. 
He couldn't help it. It gave him comfort in 
the twilight alone with his treasures, alone. 
Absolutely alone in the world in his last years 
as he sought with the feeble remnant of his 
days to lend aid to other people's boys, he 
who no longer had a boy of his own. 

It is not all so dark, however, for many 
go through unscathed. I wish, for instance, 
I could give you a picture of the young flying 
corps sergeant, just going up for his lieuten- 
ancy, whom I talked with last night. This 
is considered the most dangerous but most 
enviable branch of the service. Smooth, 
slender and supple, he stood there, flicking his 



British are Brave in Sorrow 111 

puttees with his swagger stick; his little fore- 
and-aft cap that gives such a dare-devil look 
to these lads of the air, not hiding at all, but 
rather emphasizing, the sleek and shining 
brightness of his hair. He was scarcely twenty- 
one, yet he said, "I have been flying, sir, for 
two years and a half all up and down the lines 
and never had a scratch. Oh, yes, machine 
gun bullets have pierced my planes. I counted 
two hundred holes once. And one day a shell 
passed through the body of the plane and 
ripped off the back of my seat, but I scarcely 
knew it had happened, felt the plane lunge 
and vibrate, that was all. You see the shell 
was on its upward trajectory, and going very 
fast. I saw one of our boys fighting a Hun 
when his plane took fire. He knew he was 
gone, so he just took a plunge at the Hun and 
rammed him and both of them went whirling 
down in a stream of fire. They have taken 
me off the firing line, though I'm perfectly 
fit, and put me on home defense. They say 
that two years is long enough, though I have 
not lost my nerve and my heart is unaffected. 
I'm sorry, I wish I were back at the front. 
People in England don't take the war half 
seriously enough. I'd rather be out there." 



VERDUN IS MIGHTY 

OF all places in France that I would 
have desired most to visit, the chief est 
is Verdun. So it was with a sense 
of deep obligation that I learned we were 
going thither. No name will come out of this 
war more famous, no matter what other fields 
are yet to be fought. 

As we drove up to the gates of the old 
fortress town, the colonel in command of the 
garrison stood there talking with the sentries. 
He acknowledged our salutes brusquely, as if 
thinking of something else. I learned in a 
few minutes that two shells had just fallen 
near these gates and the colonel had come out 
to see if we could get in. 

Soon he joined us at the citadel; white- 
haired and white-mustached, he was, large and 
fatherly. He is one of those men who, at 
first sight, fill you with confidence, respect, 
admiration — I had almost said affection. 

These old soldiers of France are impressive 
men, all of them, from the general in com- 
mand, on down through the colonel in com- 
mand of the citadel, to the majors who hold 

112 



Verdun is Mighty 113 

the outlying forts. They are toughened, and 
hardened, swarthy veterans. Indeed, I do not 
know when I have encountered a body of 
men quite so impressive. 

There is first of all, General Giulliamat, in 
command of the fourth army, whom we had 
met earlier in the day at headquarters. He 
it was who led the push at Verdun in the 
summer of 191 7, which was so successful. He 
is a small, tight-knit, quiet-spoken man, evi- 
dently of nervous force and energy and of 
great kindliness and courtesy. 

Then, besides our colonel, our immediate 
host, stationed in the city of Verdun, there 
are various majors, one in each of the out- 
lying posts that ray out like the spokes of 
a fan from the handle at Verdun. These 
majors either came in to mess to visit, or we 
met them at their posts. Every one of them 
had had his wound — some of them several. 
I saw one French officer with six gold stripes, 
each indicating a wound received at a time 
different from the others. More than one of 
the staff of officers had lost a son in the war. 
The colonel himself had had frozen feet, 
along with twelve hundred men in his divi- 
sion, one night on the snowy, windy slopes 
about the impregnable town. 

There are no civilians in Verdun; and pre- 
cious few soldiers are seen upon its streets, as 



114 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

the Boche keeps dropping his souvenirs into the 
place which he could not storm. The last day 
we were there, as we drove in to luncheon at 
the citadel, we had intended to go up on the 
hill above, to have a look at the cemetery- 
there; but the Huns took a notion to shell 
us a while, and five "Jack Johnsons" came 
howling over and exploded around us. Yon- 
der lay a fresh killed horse, somehow more 
pitiful, if possible, than a fresh killed man. 

So the colonel changed his mind and took 
us to the safety of the citadel. During three 
days along this front we were under shell fire 
all the time; but our nights were spent in 
peace, as we slept ninety feet underground. 
Indeed, in that deep security, one could not 
even hear the smaller artillery. 

I awoke at four o'clock one morning to 
hear the distant reverberations of shells over- 
head, and upon inquiry at breakfast learned, 
from a British major-general of artillery there 
on liaison duty, that nothing less than a 
three-twenty or three- forty could penetrate 
our ears in our fastness. 

It is perfectly futile for the Boche to waste 
his ammunition upon Verdun, as a whole 
division could lodge in the citadel as safely 
as in their homes in the middle of France. 
Indeed, we all voted the citadel of Verdun as 
the best and safest hotel in Europe. If it 



Verdun is Mighty 115 

were in London it would soon make a fortune 
for its owners. 

In other hotels there is always the possibility 
of injury from air rails; in this citadel none. 
We dined there one evening with thirteen at 
table, and scattered next morning toward all 
points of the front lines. 

They were interesting occasions, those meals 
of ours in the officers' dining room deep un- 
derground. The ceiling alone, arched like a 
roof of the subway, or the tube, betrayed that 
we were underground. 

Mirrors glittered upon the walls; old armor 
graced them; and huge models of the Croix-de- 
guerre, the medaille militaire, and the Legion 
d' Honneur, made of bayonets and bits of 
glittering ammunition, hung upon them. Silver 
and cut glass sparkled, wine and champagne 
bubbled, and great smoking tureens and plat- 
ters betrayed no food shortage. 

What was finer still than all of these was 
the confident, cheery, even if grim, determina- 
tion written upon the faces of the French 
officers about that board. These are the men, 
who, in the darkest days of the war, for 
France, inscribed with their blood upon the 
banners of their country, that motto, born no- 
body knows how and destined never to die, 
''On ne passe pas" (they shall not pass). 

What a change in the fortunes of France 



116 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

since that motto came first through clenched 
teeth, out of parched dry mouths, rattled in 
the throat of the dying, came screaming 
through the air with the seventy-fives, and 
burned itself in fire and blood upon the 
memory of France! They did not pass; they 
shall never pass; they can no longer so much 
as try to pass ;. and France now knows that 
she is safe. 

We journeyed out to the front lines from 
Verdun, journeyed as far as we could by 
motor, and then threaded the communication 
trenches the rest of the way. We stood in 
those old forts that protected the approaches 
to the town, until the walls of the forts, the. 
embankments, the moats, became heaps of 
formless dust and dirt, sand and gravel. I 
never stood upon ground that thrilled me more 
than that at Fort Vaux, where, for days with- 
out water, without food, with swollen black- 
ened tongues, in caverns of the earth filled 
with poisonous gases and the fumes of their 
own artillery, that little band, under the 
dauntless Major Reynal, stood to the end, 
loosed their last carrier-dove to their com- 
rades behind, imploring aid which could not 
be sent them, received message after message 
begging them to hold on, until the mighty 
catacylsm burst open the earth in which they 
stood and engulfed them every one. 



Verdun is Mighty 117 

The last message Reynal received was from 
the commander-in-chief: "I create you com- 
mander of the Legion of Honor!" 

In those communication trenches we paused 
at convenient points to listen to the interlacing 
shells overhead. Our own shells, departing, 
sang encouragingly above us, with a very dif- 
ferent and far more inspiriting note than that 
of the German arrivals. We listened to these 
last approaching, a wicked sound they have, 
and then watched to see their effect upon their 
objectives behind and around us. 

I had never been convinced, until an Italian 
officer recently proved it to me, that you 
•never can hear the shell that gets you. The 
soldiers in all armies always seek to encourage 
new comers with this information. I had sup- 
posed it merely a superstition, kindly spread, 
to cheer up the timid; but I am sure now it 
is true. It is simply a matter of the compara- 
tive velocity of the shell and its sound. The 
shell travels faster than the sound; and the 
only shell you ever hear is really already past 
you, before you hear its whistle. 

If it comes directly at you, it explodes be- 
fore the sound of the whistling reaches you. 
In other words, you can't hear the whistle 
until after you are dead. 

Nevertheless, old tried campaigners will 
dodge at the rush of a shell. I saw our 



118 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

French captain, our cicerone, duck time and 
again; I never saw the coloned or any com- 
mander or soldier of Verdun duck. I have 
seen old war correspondents who have been 
in battles from Antwerp to Monte Santo, 
jump and duck as if it were their first time 
under fire. 

We watched an aviation battle one afternoon 
from the trenches. The air was balmy, sunny 
and filled with the hum of planes, as it always 
is during favorable weather at the front, that 
sounded for all the world like the hum of 
a perplexed and wandering swarm of bees, or 
like an orchard in midsummer, where honey 
bees and bumble bees are drowsily luxuriating. 

Suddenly, over our heads, came the sharp 
rat-a-tat of machine guns; and in the fleecy, 
golden mistiness above we saw the planes. 
Three of them there were, two evidently 
Hun from the darkness of their coloring, and 
one — what was he? Surely, he must be 
French, else why the firing. The colonel fo- 
cused his glasses, as all of us did; then the 
colonel cried excitedly — it was the only time 
I ever saw him excited — ^'il est Frangais!*' 
(He is French!) 

The daring knight of the air was dashing 
at them, one against two! Again came the 
rattle of the guns; shrapnel was now dotting 
the sky all about them, from the archies, 



Verdun is Mighty 119 

or anti-aircraft guns, on either side down 
below. 

The black puffs of German shrapnel en- 
circled the Frenchman, and the white puffs of 
the French encircled the Boches. They ducked, 
dived, mounted, spat out streams of smoke 
behind, like noisome insects trying to poison 
the air in their wake, and wheeling past each 
other, let go from their noses the still more 
deadly darts of fire at each other. 

We, below, held our breath while the lone 
Frenchman writhed and maneuvered up above. 
Rat-a-tat — r-r-r-rat-tat ! Suddenly the tri- 
color plane pitched, fluttered like a dead leaf, 
came twisting and whirling slowly down; and 
we cried out. The colonel fairly shouted: 
"O, mon dieu. II est malade!" (He is hurt.) 

I had so often seen this winding, fluttering 
dive that I cried in response : "No. No. He 
is only maneuvering! He is only escaping!" 

''Non, nonT cried the colonel. ''Malade! 
II est malade r (He is hit. He is wounded. 
He is sick.) 

I was reluctantly convinced ; for the French- 
man, righting at last, a thousand feet or so 
above our heads, went brokenly, like a wild 
fowl wounded, toward the rear, and quickly 
faded from our sight. 

Next day we saw his plane, lying like a 
huge broken butterfly, crushed by a storm, with 



120 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

outspread, helpless wings, not far back of our 
own front lines. We were happy to learn, 
however, that the pilot was uninjured. 

That same afternoon we saw a queer thing. 
A dark colored flier hung almost motionless 
above us, as if anchored there. We all made 
him out to be a Boche; for the Hun planes, 
with the black cross painted upon them give 
an effect of darkness, in the sky, as compared 
with the brighter allied planes. Other planes 
were higher up, for we could see the shrapnel, 
bursting, with long-time fuses, way above him 
in the sky./ He seemed to pay no attention 
to all the furore in the air, but hung there, 
poised tranquilly. 

Then, great Scott! All of a sudden we 
saw his planes flap like the wings of a bird — 
they were the wings of a bird — he was no 
airplane at all, or rather he was an airplane 
of the oldest and most perfect type. King of 
the air was he! 

A huge brown and black master of all 
storms he was, that eagle. And in his royal 
self-possession he could afford to ignore the 
anger and the clashings of puny men trying 
to dispute with him the sovereignty of the 
blue ! On my word, the gunfire and the planes 
had no more effect upon his highness than 
would have had so many sparrows or sky-larks. 



Verdun is Mighty 121 

They tell me this is true of most of the 
birds, which, unless actually hit, or their nests 
and perches destroyed, go on about their busi- 
ness of mating, singing, home-making, all un- 
mindful of the crazy strife of man. 

Under the hill, in a safe spot, comparatively, 
we paused to greet the Englishmen of a certain 
Red Cross station. Oh, yes, their post was 
pretty safe, they said. To be sure, the roads 
to the front lines were bad, were always bad, 
for Fritz had them all registered, and could 
plant his shells wherever he liked. Yes, their 
cars had all been hit. He who supposes all 
the danger, or even the worst danger, at times, 
to be in the front line trenches, does not know 
the front. 

They looked it, too, those cars scarred and 
worn. Fritz was no respecter of cars of any 
kind. The Red Cross meant little or nothing 
to him. Haven't you seen the hospitals 
bombed by his planes? Yes, we had seen 
them; pitiful wrecks they were! As pitiful 
as the helpless men crushed in their helpless- 
ness and doubly done in. 

Yes, there had formerly been American 
drivers on this post. In fact they had left 
only last week, and the English had taken 
over from them. Those Americans had left 
a record! The French say they are regular 



122 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

devils, and afraid of nothing. These lads 
seem to love the sound of shellfire and a bar- 
rage ; and the worse the road the more anxious 
seem these young daredevils to travel it. So 
said these Englishmen to us. 

Yonder, beneath the hill, lay the cemetery 
with its two thousand or more of new graves, 
part of the price paid for the brilliant push 
of 19 1 7. Yonder, still nearer Verdun, was the 
larger cemetery, where five thousand French 
sleep in an acre or so of ground. You would 
not believe men could lie so close together, 
or little wooden crosses stand so thick without 
elbowing each other. 

And all these are only part, a very small 
part, of the vast army of Frenchmen who 
have given their lives to make good the motto, 
^'On ne passe pas." 

One must count by tens of thousands, scores 
of thousands, up into the hundreds of thou- 
sands before the tale is told. Yonder on the 
Somme I had seen a hillside where they told 
me two hundred thousand French had paid 
the uttermost farthing; but they are not 
greater in their numbers than this ghostly but 
glorious army that, at Verdun, now and for- 
ever, breathe and will continue to breathe, 
"On ne passe pas" — They shall not, they shall 
not pass! 



XII 
CHAMPAGNE AND CAMOUFLAGE 

IT was on the Champagne front. We stood 
talking, a group of us, in the offices of 
a half -destroyed factory upon a hill. 
The Boche lines were a few kilometers away. 
We had just been looking down upon them. 
Thank God, we can look down upon them at 
most places now. We had been talking with 
the manager of the factory about his difficulties 
in keeping employees. 

No wonder. Shells come there every day; 
he pointed out the spot where a man had been 
killed a few days before in the courtyard. 
He showed us the damage done on such a 
day and on such a day. Even rifle balls came 
whizzing through the court. A car drove into 
the yard while we talked and its hood was 
cut through in places by shrapnel. 

Now, in the second story of the office build- 
ing that evidently had once been so beautiful, 
but every room of which had received a shell, 
we were standing upon sandbags placed there 
to keep falling shells from propping upon the 
heads of workmen beneath. I noticed that 

123 



124 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

where the sacks had contained bits of earth 
and seed the green shoots of grass were spring- 
ing up. Perhaps there will be a lawn there in 
that office some day. 

While we were talking thus, there came 
the sound of firing from our battery down 
the hillside, and our French captain cried: 
"Come, they have an objective," and we hur- 
ried after him and ran down to the battery. 

It was carefully hidden in the cliff side, in 
caves and dens, and we approached it through 
trenches. It does not do for men to be seen 
coming and going to batteries, as this would 
reveal the location of guns to enemy observers. 
For this reason the commanders and men of 
artillery units do not care to receive visitors. 

The visitors may come and stay an hour 
and nothing happen; then as soon as they are 
gone the enemy may receive the report of an 
airman, may select the little square on the map 
indicated by him and may drop a few shells 
into it by way of search for the battery. 

So the poor fellows at the guns may suffer 
for the curiosity or friendliness of their 
visitors. Furthermore, the gunners do not like 
to open up their guns without a definite ob- 
jective, just to show them off; as fire draws 
fire. 

The shells of our seventy-fives, however, 



Champagne and Camouflage 125 

were ripping across the road above our heads, 
sailing out of the wood and starting for some 
point on the plain three or four miles away; 
so we took the chance of being welcomed in 
the chambers where the dainty little guns live, 
and went ahead. We received a most cordial 
welcome, stood in the narrow little stall behind 
one of these thoroughbreds of ordnance, 
jammed our fingers into our ears and felt 
compressed air kick us in the face. Then I 
picked up one of the brass shells that fell 
automatically from the chamber and dropped 
it again quickly. When it had cooled I made 
its closer acquaintance, begged to adopt it and 
received a smiling assent. The empty shell 
will make a fine dinner gong. 

We had scarcely departed, after leaving 
boxes of cigarettes for the poilus, when the 
inevitable happened; the enemy got to work 
upon that hill and we saw a great shell fall 
and throw up dust, smoke and earth from the 
factory where we had lately been. We hoped 
that none of our kind friends up there had 
paid for our visit. Then we remembered that 
the battery had had its objective anyhow and 
our consciences were at rest. 

We were driving over screened roads all 
the time; that is, roads hung with matting, 
because they are easily discernible from the 



126 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

sausage balloons of the enemy and are regis- 
tered upon his charts for fire. Practically all 
the roads we drove over those days along the 
front are of this character, except those which 
run behind natural screens, like hills or woods. 

And yet, exposed as these highways are and 
shot to pieces as are the villages along them, 
the peasant population is living quietly ahead 
as if nothing out of the ordinary were occur- 
ring and no shells or bombs were likely any 
time to drop upon their heads. For example, 
I observed, in one such village, groups of 
French soldiers taking their evening mess in 
the streets, while side by side with them were 
a group of little girls playing keep house 
under a cart, with dolls and a tiny bed. 

Of all the sad sights along the French 
frontier, there is nothing sadder than the once 
beautiful city of Rheims. Somehow Arras did 
not tug at my heartstrings as did Rheims. I 
don't know why, unless it be that a few people 
were still trying to live and do business in 
Arras, while almost none are in Rheims. From 
a city of 150,000 it has gone down to less 
than five thousand. Besides, in Arras the 
numbers of British Tommies give life to the 
place, while in Rheims there is scarcely a foot- 
fall in the grass-grown streets. 

Yet, again, the Cathedral of Arras is a ruin 



Champagne and Camouflage 127 

out and out, while that of Rheims, where Joan 
saw the Dauphin crowned, has resisted the 
most pitiless onslaughts and still rears its proud 
walls and columns in perfect outline, although 
all its beauty of ornamentation has been 
stripped away. These old stones of the 
Twelfth Century are all dovetailed and mor- 
tised. 

So that noble cathedral, refusing to bow its 
head before the storm, although all its win- 
dows, statuary, and painting had been withered 
from its walls as it were a beautiful woman 
whose draperies had been scorched by fire, 
pelted by hail and soaked by a deluge, seemed 
to me an image of fair France, whose beauty 
and richness had been despoiled by the bar- 
barian, but whose spirit is unconquerable and 
proud. It was pitiful to see the piles of sand- 
bags before the choice carvings of the lower 
facade, placed there in an attempt to preserve 
them. 

Most pitiful of all was the great rose win- 
dow to the west, with its incomparable colors 
in the evening light, gaping now in hollow 
caverns. It is all too sorrowful to think about; 
and there is absolutely no excuse for the Hun, 
since we ourselves had stood only half an 
hour before upon heights far greater than the 
towers of the cathedral; the French had ob- 



128 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

servatories enough without using the twin 
spires of this precious church and so endanger- 
ing it. 

Anywhere in Rheims one can look down at 
his feet and see bits of shell and shrapnel 
bullets still remaining after all the masses of 
metal that passing soldiers have long ago 
picked up and carried away. We saw huge 
fragments, bases and fuses of shells piled up 
in the cathedral itself. Six hundred shells 
have fallen in the church and each of us car- 
ried away in his pocket some such souvenir 
of the unspeakable tragedy of Rheims. 

There is nothing more beautiful on earth 
than this Champagne country, with its south- 
ern, sunny slopes covered with vines, with its 
women and children working feverishly to 
supply the places of the men in gathering the 
vintage. They say they will be able to get in 
all the grapes; and we saw wagon load after 
wagon load driven along the gently sloping 
roads by little boys, women, old men and an 
occasional soldier. 

Crowning many of the crests of these hills, 
and clothing all the northern slopes of them, 
are deep forests, where the wild boar was 
hunted in the days of Caesar and Charle- 
mange, and is hunted to-day, or would be, if 
men were not too busy hunting each other. 



Champagne and Camouflage 129 

The courtly captain of the staff, who con- 
ducted us on this tour of the Champagne and 
Verdun fronts, was, before the war, a gentle- 
man of leisure and an ardent sportsman. 
When, years ago, he retired from active 
service in the army, he told me he hunted in 
various parts of the world for much of his 
time; and for the rest, "Ah, well," said he, 
"there was Paris — and art — ^and music!'* 
And his face glowed. 

Once I said to him: "This is a most 
beautiful country. It is worth fighting for!" 

I never heard a man speak with deeper con- 
viction and more vibrant enthusiasm when he 
made this reply : 

"Ah, yes ! France has everything heart can 
desire. It is washed by three seas. It has 
the cool north and the warm south, mountain 
and plain. It has color, light, soft rain; the 
best wines in the world. It knows how to 
live, to create literature, music, art; it loves 
the beautiful; its people are gentle, tender, 
kind, but brave. Yes, it is worth fighting for." 

Then another time, when I expressed some 
astonishment and admiration over the fact 
that France had loaned of her strength to 
Italy in these days, after all these years of 
exhausting war, he answered: 

"Do you remember that picture of Sir Ed- 



130 VFacing the Hindenburg Line 



ward Landseer's, in which the old hound that 
everybody thought was worn out clutches at 
the throat of the stag at bay? Do you re- 
member the title of that picture: 'There's Life 
in the Old Dog Yet'?" 

Germany never made a greater mistake 
than when she thought France defenseless, 
unless it was when she thought Britain de- 
cadent and America negligible. These three 
mistakes form a necklace of millstones round 
the throat of the Prussian military autocracy; 
they will drown the beast deeper than the 
Lusitania. 

But of all the inspiring exhibitions of this 
war there is none more chivalrous, more cour- 
ageous, more hopeful for democracy on earth 
than that of France, invaded, shelled, bombed, 
burned — like the glorious cathedral of Jeanne 
d'Arc at Rheims — a people loving peace and 
seeking peace and pursuing peace, set upon by 
a ruthless savage war power, yet rising un- 
shaken, invincible, wounded, but fair and 
strong. ''On ne passe pas! (they shall not 
pass)" — the immortal motto of Verdun, are 
the words done in blood from the thorns upon 
her brow, that speak the spirit of France. 



XIII 
THE RED TRIANGLE OF WAR 

THERE came a day when I had to do 
with a very different red triangle from 
that with which I had been concerned 
all summer. This was the red triangle of war 
and destruction, fire and flaming sword, the 
triangle from which the German fell back to 
the Hindenburg line, leaving to beautiful 
France the heritage of blackened, dismantled, 
unrestorable cities, towns and villages. 

One hundred and fifty kilometers our 
speedometer registered when we had threaded 
in and out among these ruins of a once pros- 
perous, happy and rich country; had looked 
down into Saint Quentin and the German lines 
and had returned to the French general head- 
quarters at night. 

Sherman in his march to the sea never 
dreamed of destruction like that. The only 
parallel I have seen is the total abolition of 
Wytschaete, at Messines Ridge, and that was 
the result of bombardment, not of deliberate 
dynamiting and burning. It is one thing for 

131 



132 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

a town to be wiped out between the hammer 
and the anvil of two opposing armies and 
another for it to suffer no bullet wound, but 
only bombs. 

We were in Joan of Arc's country; and we 
met a little Joan of to-day. Even her name 
was Jeanne; and she sat on my knee, gazed a 
while at the photo of a little American lad 
then gravely kissed him and smiled the quiet- 
est, most adorable of smiles into my face. 
Her eyes were deep and dark with the mystery 
of a childhood spent between the waves of two 
great armies; her features were perfect, 
beautiful to a degree ; and, later, when I stood 
in Joan's chapel, where she took the holy 
communion in armor before setting off to 
Orleans, the child's face was reflected to me 
in the white marble of Joan's efhgy. For 
months this little girl's home had been in the 
hands of the Hun, and now it was left to 
her desolate. 

A Spanish senator was of our party, a 
quick moving, springy, courtly gentleman of 
Andalusia, with his Sancho Panza by his side, 
his secretary. They seemed to me strange 
modern remnants of a day when their own 
land took the lead in all such titanic strug- 
gles as this. Not being able to speak their 
tongue, nor to understand much of their 



The Red Triangle of War 1S3 

French, I could not pierce deeply into their 
state of mind; but we stood side by side at 
general headquarters, and gazed upon the 
beautiful structure that had often held the 
greatest warrior of all time — Napoleon — and 
each thought our own thoughts. Strange how 
much less one hears the name of Napoleon 
these days in France, than ever before. After 
all, even his battles have paled into compara- 
tive insignificance. 

We went mile after mile over roads, once 
the most perfect in the world, now broken and 
patched, from town to town and village to 
village, whose names have been pathetically 
prominent in the dispatches. Noyon, Chauny, 
Ham, Roye, Lassigny. One can understand 
a part of the destruction as intended to de- 
prive the French of their resources; for ex- 
ample, the wilderness of blackened, twisted 
iron in what were once the factories, sugar 
factories, mirror factories and the like. But 
one cannot understand the destruction of 
cathedrals, too far from the Hindenburg line 
to serve as observatories. 

We stepped into what was left of one beauti- 
ful church. Designedly or not, a bit of the 
roof was left over the altar, the choir and the 
organ consol; and on the door was printed 
a list of stated services. We heard the organ 



134 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

rolling and found a poilu with bowed head 
and closed eyes playing in deep-throated minor 
tones the sorrows of the souls of men. All 
the metal of the great pipes had been stripped 
away by the Boche to supply his need of 
copper, and the organ itself, under the roof- 
less portion of the ruined transept grinned 
hollow and black as a skull. I could scarcely 
bear the music of desolation, and the bowed 
head of France. 

There were acres and acres of interlaced 
barbed wire in the fields along all our roads, 
miles and miles of trenches that had been first 
lines, second lines, transverse and communica- 
tion systems. It seemed horribly confused, 
and yet once it was all part of a definite plan. 
Poppies, dog daisies, wild flowers and weeds 
of all kinds were now taking these trenches 
gently and peacefully and covering up, as if 
ashamed, the violent toil of men. 

Sometimes the trenches were on each side 
of our road, and here the foes had faced each 
other across thirty yards of paved No Man's 
Land. Again the ditches would^ coil and un- 
coil through a village or group of farmhouses, 
and once the yawning serpent writhed into the 
cellar windows of a mansion and out on the 
other side. Chateaux that had once been 
beautiful, well nigh perfect, crowning lovely 



The Red Triangle of War 135 

wooded heights, now stood, if they could be 
said to stand, so lamely did they lean and 
totter, blackened, windowless, shattered. 

One can understand the destruction of forest 
trees for lumbering purposes ; but when giants 
of forty years are thrown down and left to 
rot, and when fruit trees are girdled, that 
could not have borne for some years to come, 
so young were they, one wonders whether any 
plan except utter ruthlessness lay back of it 
all. The towns may be rebuilt — though it 
would be easier to begin elsewhere and build 
all over anew — but the trees cannot be re- 
placed under two generations. And as for 
the lives of the young girls, the young mothers, 
the youths, driven away into practical slavery, 
and starved into debauchery and prostitution, 
they can never be restored except somewhere 
in a beyond. 

Most of this red triangle was never fought 
over. There are few wooden crosses to tell the 
tale of struggle between man and man. It was 
simply wrecked, burned, crimsoned with the 
unshed blood of hearts bleeding internally; 
and how the heart of France drips, drips, 
drips ! With the sad-eyed, feature-drawn cap- 
tain beside me, a man who had spent two 
years and nine months in trench and firing 
line, since the sixth of August, 19 14, and, 



136 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

unwounded outwardly, but physically some- 
what broken, had been taken out for lighter 
staff duties, I could do nothing but murmur: 
*'Je ne comprend pas — I cannot understand." 
He grimly murmured in reply: ^'Non! Bon! 
Je ne comprend pas/' 

We paused at Prince Eitel Friedrich's 
pleasure ground — ^the lodge he established and 
held for months and even years, for cham- 
pagne parties, cards and carousals. And I 
recalled what I had been told in the Isle of 
Wight, where this young princeling had been 
a-pleasuring when the war came on. He was 
suddenly called home, near the end of July, 
19 1 4. Somebody knew what was coming. 
The young barbarian, according to the natives 
of the isle, smashed up the furniture in his 
rooms, tore the hangings, soiled the linens 
and upholsteries in unspeakable ways, and 
stole away very unlike the Arabs. There are 
other such tales told of the Hohenzollerns in 
Europe; they seem to have this sort of way 
about them. 

Standing near the prince's famous abris, 
or dug-out, we could see the Saint Quentin 
Cathedral clearly; and we could see the shells 
falling and exploding in the ground between. 
Then we passed into the zone of fire. Here 
everything was covered with camouflage. 



The Red Triangle of War 137 

Every cameon or motor truck, every tent, 
every camp object, was ringstreaked with 
paint to look like the ground. The roads, at 
exposed points were, of course, hung with 
screens of grass or colored fibers to hide pass- 
ing motors and men from enemy eyes. We 
knew now we could be reached at any time 
by German fire. 

The poilu, however, went about in this 
realm of fire, with less apparent care for his 
safety than Tommy Atkins; for, whereas, the 
latter always dons his steel helmet and keeps 
his gas protector handy when near the line, 
the former comes and goes, and even walks 
along the roads and fields in his cap. We 
saw engineers building telephone lines — ^and 
such neat, natty work they were doing, too, 
within three or four miles of the German lines 
— entirely without helmets. Our car gathered 
a ground telephone wire around its front 
axle at one place and ran away with it. Sig- 
nal corps men at the instrument must have 
been startled. Our chauffeur took his wire 
cutters and clipped it calmly and left the end 
to be found by the searching engineers. 

While this delay took place, I heard the 
hum of planes and stepped out of the car 
to look up. There he was, the little silver 
insect; he must have been sixteen thousand 



138 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

feet above us. I was trying to make him out, 
when he darted into a cloud and disappeared. 
Then came two planes that I knew were 
French, lower down, but climbing, and I was 
satisfied of the nationality of the first one. 
He must have borne the black cross, while the 
two with the tri-color circles must have been 
after him. 

Closer and closer we came to the lines, 
until we dismounted at last and took the rest 
of the way afoot. Through fields of clover, 
along hedge rows, over ditches, we made our 
way about a mile up the ridge until we crept 
into a well concealed outlook and could gaze 
straight away down to the lines and the be- 
leaguered city beneath. It was a quiet day, 
although some artillery activity was going on. 
Our own guns were playing on each side of us 
and occasionally some of our "big stuff" went 
rumbling like a train of cars over our heads. 
We could hear the Boche gun speak, wait a 
few minutes and then hear the explosion of 
the shell to right or left. One quickly gets 
accustomed to the difference in language of 
the batteries, friend or foe. 

Just beside us, on the hillside, poilus were 
quietly digging and building. We asked them 
what they were engaged upon, another ob- 
servatory? No, it was a telephone station. 



The Red Triangle of War 139 

Then we retraced our steps and thought of 
the city lying yonder that the French could, 
at any moment, blow to kingdom come, and 
capture. Only they prefer, if possible, to 
spare its beauty; and squeeze the Boche out. 

On the route that we passed was the town 
where Miss Morgan was faithfully at work, 
and had been for many months, ministering 
to the hungry, needy, refugee people of the 
district. We saw ambulances, too, with the 
Stars and Stripes upon them, and young 
Americans in the drivers' seats. 

At one point we passed a single grave — 
McConnell's it was — within ten feet of the 
roadside. It will ever be a sacred spot to 
French and Americans alike. The tricolor 
circle of the French air service marks it; 
flowers are kept fresh on it; the flags of both 
nations float in the winds above it. It is 
the lovely resting place of a man who fought, 
alone in the clouds, fell to his death alone, 
resolutely went to his great renunciation like 
him who trod the wine press alone; but who, 
to-day, please God, is not alone, but is with 
the hundreds of the heroic who confer to- 
gether over the feeble little struggles of that 
distant little planet where once they lived and 
strove. 



XIV 
WITH THE POILU AND HIS OFFICER 

FRENCH officers are, most of them, men 
of education and refinement. Some 
notable literature is coming out of the 
trenches. 

For example, we spent a couple of days 
in the company of a lieutenant, with gray 
streaked beard, full lips and eye-glasses, and 
a surprised, inquiring manner, who seemed to 
us all quite childlike and naive. When we 
bade him good-by he gave each of us a copy 
of his book, "Les Bienfaits de la Guerre," 
which showed not only an unusual and original 
mastery of the French tongue, but also a 
wealth of experience drawn from the front 
line trenches and the nearness of death. 

Before reading his book he struck me as a 
gold laced staff officer who had probably never 
smelt powder nearer than a mile and a half. 
After reading I knew that his soft, white 
hands had known the grime and the slime, the 
battle and the blood of the life struggle of 
France. 

140 



With the Poilu and his Officer; 141 

The captain who had us in charge, a most 
courtly officer, to whom I have alluded in an- 
other chapter as a gentleman of wealth, leisure 
and sportsmanship, we learned afterwards, 
was a nobleman of an old line. A baron he 
was ; but no titles are worn by French officers 
unless their grade is general or higher. 

He told us also that another captain with 
whom we had been associated was, in civil 
life. Count So-and-so. Our captain was a 
graduate of the West Point of France, had 
served a number of years, and was retired 
when the war broke out. He immediately 
volunteered, but was not called in time to be 
in the battle of the Marne. 

"Being among the first to volunteer,*' he 
smiled, "my papers were no doubt near the 
bottom of the pile, and so, near the last to 
be reached." 

And here he put his finger on the weakness 
of democracies — ours as well as his — in mat- 
ters of administration. While he seemed far 
from criticizing anybody or any system, we 
learned afterwards that he is a royalist and, 
with others of his class, would like to see the 
throne re-established in France, and the Bour- 
bons upon it. 

Other officers we met, — for example, the 
colonel commanding Verdun, — who seemed to 



142 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

us like gruff, matter-of-fact American business 
men ; others, like the officers of chasseurs, with 
their natty blue uniforms and slender supple- 
ness, recalled the heroes of Dumas and the 
leaders surrounding Napoleon. Still others, 
like the fighting majors in charge of the de- 
fenses of Verdun, were rough, hairy fellows, 
with dark faces, lined and scarred, who looked 
as if they might be the product of the 
peasantry of France, risen by sheer force and 
devotion and courage to their stations of com- 
mand. 

There may be officers in the French army, 
as there are in all armies, who remain behind 
in safety and send their men up to the lines 
of fire and of death; but they were not the 
type of men we met in the front lines at 
Verdun. 

Furthermore, though there are those who 
complain of official France, the bunglesome 
administration, the interminable red tape, I 
was not one of those who suffered any great 
inconvenience from these obstacles to progress. 
I found more intricacies in our own American 
administration than in that of France. 

The only insolence or even gruffness that 
I encountered in French bureaus was at the 
hands of little underlings, clerks, factotums. It 
is always so, in every nation. 



With the Poilu and his Officer 143 

The only thing to do is to elbow them aside, 
get to the men higher up; and in France, at 
least, you can meet with unfailing courtesy. 
You cannot always get what you want for 
the first asking; but "no" in France does not 
mean so much as in England. 

You can ask in a different way; you can 
come back on the morrow with the same 
request made from a different angle; you can 
suavely insist; and, like the judge who dealt 
with the importunate widow, they give you 
what you want to get rid of you. 

Undoubtedly official France likes to write 
things. There are more blanks to be filled 
up, more particulars to be given, more dates, 
figures, ages, pounds-weight, meters-height, to 
be registered, more photographs of yourself 
to furnish, than in any country in Europe. 

Some American ambulance drivers have 
complained to me that they have brought in 
severely wounded men to the pastes de 
secours, who had to lie and wait until official 
France could write down in blank forms all 
about them, before their wounds could be 
dressed. Others have denied the charge. 
Anyway, it is altogether in character with 
French administration that pads and plenty of 
pads must be much written upon in all emer- 
gencies. 



144 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

Another way to get what you want from 
a Frenchman is to tell him all about yourself, 
your wife, your children, your mother-in-law, 
your hopes, and aspirations. Not being a 
silent race themselves, they do not appreciate 
silence and reticence on the part of others. 
They are vitally interested in everything that 
concerns you. Once get their interest thor- 
oughly enlisted and they will find some way 
through the mazes of official waitings and 
tabulations. 

Is this a childlike characteristic? If so, it 
is an admirable one. It is the bond of human 
interest. Especially is it true of the French- 
man, as indeed it is to a degree of everybody 
else, that if he has once done you a favor 
he is your friend forever, looks upon you as 
his property and his very special charge. This 
is, after all, is it not, a testimony to the in- 
herent kindness of the human race, and its 
desire to serve. 

Now to hark back to the French soldier. 
He is called the poilu, the hairy one. I think 
he is rightly called. Some say the reference 
is to his Samsonic strength; others to his 
usually unkempt condition. Whichever is the 
true interpretation, he is a poilu. 

He certainly is not so neat, clean shaven, 
so anxious for shined buttons and polished 



With the Poilu and his OflBcer 145 

boots as Tommy Atkins. Neither is the 
American Sammy. Nobody can approach 
Tommy in these regards. The faded blue of 
the French private soldier lends to the air of 
negligence that enfolds his personality. Then 
when he is wounded, the old uniform adds to 
the pathos of his appearance. 

I never can forget the sight, by one of the 
shell-swept roads of Verdun, when I encoun- 
tered two "walking wounded," in charge of 
a single Red Cross man. One of the wounded 
men could seemingly go no further; or else 
his bandages had slipped. He was lying on 
the grass beyond the camouflage of the road 
along which we drove. 

The Red Cross man was bending over him 
ministering to him. It was the other poilu, 
however, who looked most pitiful. He stood 
at an opening in the camouflage, blinded, and 
with red bandages across his eyes, his head 
bowed already in the patient helplessness of 
the blind. 

Of course we wanted to stop and help the 
little group, but of course the exigencies of 
war would not permit. How much the colonel 
was moved by the sight, or how much he had 
been calloused by the accustomed character of 
it, I could not tell, as I glanced at his granite 
face; but certain it is, he did not turn his 



146 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

head nor stop the car; to pause would have 
been only to draw fire. 

The poilm are drawn from all classes of the 
people, though naturally they are mostly from 
the common folks, since God made so many 
of them. There are a few from among 
scholars, artists and musicians; but, for the 
most part, they are peasant farmers, Paris 
apaches, Lille and Lens miners and factory 
operatives. They have the common charac- 
teristics of the common soldiers in all armies; 
the grumbling at their supply trains, and 
cooks, the cursing of the powers that grip 
them in the inexorable mailed hand of war, 
the living only for letters and leave, the sing- 
ing of old songs and the crazed dash to death 
over the top. 

During the long, tedious hours of waiting 
in trench or garrison or hospital the poilu 
takes refuge in the fashioning of little objects 
for sale as souvenirs of the war. He will 
take a shell casing of brass or an old cartridge 
or any bit of metal that comes his way and 
make from it the most wonderful cigar lighters 
or bricquets; a bit of flint and a small saw- 
toothed wheel of steel, a few drops of benzine 
essence and a little wick and the instrument 
is made. Everybody wants one made by a 
poilu. 



With the Poilu and his Officer 147 

Then there are the aluminum buttons of the 
Boche. These are curiously wrought into 
finger rings, sometimes with a copper or brass 
seal; and everybody in France or near France 
is wearing one of these. There are also the 
big brasses of the seventy-fives, which are 
polished and then chased in patterns, to form 
vases for flowers or gongs for the dining 
room. 

All these things, not to mention the knitted 
oddities or commodities of wool, zephyr or 
silk, which soldiers of all nations make to 
while away their hours of idleness and to add 
to their revenues; but the poilu is the most 
ingenious of any soldier I have seen in these 
pursuits. In fact, the French are an inventive 
race. 

Many soldiers till the soil, gather the crops 
for the vintage, work in the factories back of 
the lines in their rest days away from the 
front. We visited a certain chateau in the 
Champagne country with a world-famous 
name, where one hundred and twenty feet 
under ground a large force of soldiers and 
women were at work in the wine vaults, turn- 
ing the bottles to clear the champagne of sedi- 
ment, corking and uncorking the valuable 
stuff to bring it to its golden perfection. 

Twelve million quarts, they told us, were 



148 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

ripening in these cavernous corridors, only 
three kilometers, less than two miles, from the 
German first lines. Shells fall all around and 
upon the chateau itself, all the time; even 
rifle balls whistle over it. In the yard a man 
was killed last week. 

Two thousand bottles of champagne were 
smashed here two days ago by a shell; yet 
four thousand bottles a week are exported 
steadily to America, England, Russia. When 
the Hun overran this country and took this 
chateau, he extracted only a thousand bottles 
from the vaults, though there are miles and 
miles of them. Doubtless he was afraid he 
himself might be bottled if he penetrated too 
far underground. 

No wonder the manager has difficulty in 
holding his employees ; for while they are safe 
by day, when at work, they can find no safe 
place to live by night, under constant fire. We 
had scarcely driven away from the place 
when, over our shoulders we saw the black 
debris and smoke go up from a "Jack John- 
son" that fell in the premises. Hundreds of 
poilus are quartered in the wine vaults. We 
saw their beds, and we saw the men them- 
selves, and we smelled their smell. 

Then we drove away to a town where one 
of the noblest cathedrals in the world stands, 



With the Poilu and his OflScer 149 

a wreck inside and out. Not a foot of the 
square before it but is littered with the frag- 
ments of shell. Iron shards are as the sand 
upon the shore. All over the floor of the 
church itself, bits of shrapnel, bullets, shell 
fuses are strewn among the debris; and, most 
pitiful it was to see old decrepit workmen 
searching the floors for the pieces of priceless 
glass and seeking to restore them to the leads 
spread out upon benches under the gaping 
nave. 

How any soul in France can cry "Peace, 
peace," with her beauty all ravaged, her rich- 
ness despoiled, her head bowed in the ashes 
and the dust, is more than I, for one, can 
understand. Nothing but the humiliated ex- 
pulsion of the Hun can ever even half atone, 
let alone restore. Yet even in France are to 
be found some false friends of France, as in 
other nations, too, who cry "Peace, peace, when 
there is no peace !" 

These are only the few in France, please 
God. The great French people as a whole, 
though the hoarse voice rattles huskily in 
battle-parched throats, cries for no peace with- 
out victory, no rest until assurance of age- 
long peace, no surcease for this generation 
until the next and the next and the next are 
all safe from the ravages of the Hun. 



150 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

The French front does not give you the 
impression of being so thickly strewn with 
men and convoys and multifarious life as do 
the British and Italian fronts. For thirty 
miles or so back of the lines on these two 
others there curls a very swollen, writhing 
serpent of human effort, like a cordon of 
power. 

The blue line of France seems thinner, but 
doubtless the impression is due only to dif- 
ferent methods of transportation and under- 
ground living. And yet it would not be 
strange if it were true, for France has thus 
far borne most of the brunt of the war. It 
is wonderful to see how she has kept up her 
roads. She has sent away to her far Eastern 
possssions for aid, and to-day you can see 
along all these white ways the almond eyes 
of the Mongols looking slantwise from be- 
neath steel helmets. 

Some still wear their Oriental blouses or 
robes, and some their queer, wide, cane hats. 
They are not fighters, these mild, little men, 
but they are good hewers of wood and drawers 
of water and menders of roads for the poilu 
to travel upon, who is himself a "fighter 
right." I saw some of the Mongolians at 
work even in the airdromes, grooming the 
falcons of the fight. 



With the Poilu and his OflScer 151 

With all his gruffness the French soldier 
is a tender and romantic fellow. The memory 
of his women supports him. The women of 
France have been perfectly fine. To be sure, 
they are not so much employed in factories 
as English women. 

One French officer remarked: "Our women 
are made to love, not to work." Yet it is 
the women of France who have tilled the 
ground and kept the home fires burning. 

A factory manager in Italy told me they 
could not, in that country, employ women to 
any great extent. 

"For," said he, "the men and the women 
would flirt all the time." 

Indeed, among the few women I saw in 
Italian factories, his words were justified. 

It is of a woman, though, that the poilu 
thinks and speaks in his hour of need. He 
calls upon a woman when wounded, not usually 
his wife or sweetheart, but a friend more 
tried than either. His semi-conscious cry is 
for ''Maman, Maman." Indeed this seems 
true of all men. I heard an English soldier, 
struck by an air bomb, in a town where I 
was one day, as he was borne away uncon- 
scious, groaning: "Mother, oh, mother!" 



XV 

THE AIRMAN 

IF D'Artagnan were alive in France to- 
day he would not be in the Chasseurs, 
gallant and dashing as they are. Neither 
would he be in the Foreign Legion, that 
terrible body of men who give no quarter nor 
take any, and who have dwindled from some 
sixty thousand to less than eight thousand; 
who set out at each attack to collect some 
particular souvenir from the enemy — now it 
is helmets, now bayonets, now buttons; the 
last time it was officers' field glasses, a very 
good type of souvenir, indeed. 

Nor would D'Artagnan have stood behind 
that aristocratic little gun, the seventy-five, 
the thoroughbred of the artillery. Athos, 
Porthos and the rest, they might have been 
zouaves. Chasseurs a pied, light field artil- 
lerymen, bombers or bayonet pliers, but not 
D'Artagnan. If he were alive to-day he 
would undoubtedly be an airman. He could 
be nothing else and nothing less. 

The airman is the adventurer, the explorer, 
the nonpariel of the modern army. When he 

152 



The Airman 153 

is in Paris on leave, in London at the theater, 
in Milan at the Arcade, everybody turns 
around to observe him. When you mention 
that So-and-So is in aviation, other soldiers 
say: 

"Ah, that is the service! If only my eyes 
— or if my heart " 

There is a spell about the airman. The 
mystery of a new element and the mastery of 
it is woven around him. When you see him 
strolling along in the aristocratic way he can- 
not help but have with his perfect nerves, 
his perfect respiration, his perfect heart and 
his 100 per cent of eye-sight, hearing, touch 
and all the senses, he seems to tread the earth 
only with the tips of winged feet, like Mercury. 
Of course D'Artagnan, if alive, would be a 
flier. 

To tell the truth, I believe that he is alive. 
I believe I saw him, not once nor twice. I 
saw him in command of the great first flying 
school of France, where all the airmen of that 
nation go for their elementary training. I 
watched him out of the corner of my eye as 
he walked beside me to the great stalls where 
the racers of the air are kept and groomed. 

I noted the wound stripes on his arm, the 
quick gestures with which he tapped his boots 
with his swagger stick; I watched his bright 



154 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

black eyes darting from side to side over his 
beaklike nose — I have seen a number of air- 
men with noses like hawks. And more than 
once I thought of those lithe little fellows who 
used to be so famous in Kentucky, because 
they took their lives in their hands every 
time they put on colors and mounted the bony 
racers, and I remembered one, also, that I 
had seen years ago as he lay in the dust of 
the track, his bones broken, his head thrown 
back, his eyes closed. 

I saw D'Artagnan, too, not far behind the 
lines of Verdun. He was commandant of 
the artillery observers* section, and he looked 
like a hundred-yard man at Yale — except that 
he was probably 26 — and wore two little black 
streaks, one on each side of his upper lip. 

I saw him, too, in England, doing the flut- 
tering leaf dive, his plane falling helpless, 
circling and winding, hundreds of feet down, 
only to right itself and climb again, doing 
leap after leap, flying upside down for min- 
utes on end. I heard him tell calmly that 
seven men had lost their lives learning to fly 
at this field last week, two this week so far, 
fnvQ the week before last. 

I talked with him, too, in a London hotel, 
just back from the front, where his machine 
had been repeatedly riddled, the back of his 



The Airman 155 

seat carried away by a shell, and when I asked 
him what advice he would give to a young 
airman, for his care of himself, he replied: 

"Tell him not to try any tricks under a 
thousand feet from the ground, and he will 
be quite all right." 

Another bit of advice from an old flier to 
a new one is: "Never fly out of your turn. 
If there is a call to fill some other fellow's 
time, let the next man in order take it." Nor 
is this advice based solely upon superstition. 

There is good psychology back of it, for 
he explained: "If you are out of your turn 
you no more than get up into the air than you 
begin to say to yourself : 'This is not my turn, 
now I wonder if I am going to get it, when 
I should not?' and in spite of yourself you 
will become obsessed by the thought and lose 
coolness and efficiency. You may become 
reckless and desperate." 

I saw the same gallant, adventurous spirit 
of D'Artagnan in Italy in the young marquis 
who made the record flight to London a few 
days later. I stood with him beside the won- 
derful car in which he was to make the trial, 
and looked her over. He touched her rever- 
ently with his hand and looked into my eyes 
and smiled, for this was the only way we 
could converse. 



156 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

I met, also, the dauntless young Italian cap- 
tain who had made the altitude record of over 
23,000 feet, a week or two ago, with an ob- 
server. He had reached 25,000 feet alone 
before that; but of course it could not be of 
record. 

Then if ever I saw D'Artagnan in the flesh, 
it was at dinner in Milan, with Signor Caproni, 
"Engineer" Caproni, they all call him, the lead- 
ing inventor in aviation in Italy whose name is 
a household word. Caproni had just told me 
the story of this Roman young captain, at 
the end of the table ; how he had been the first 
to bomb Pola, the Austrian submarine base on 
the Adriatic; how the government had said 
it was impossible to bomb Pola, and the com- 
mands were that no airman should attempt to 
reach Pola; how this Roman captain had 
violated the commands, had gone off one night 
all alone, had done the thing that bureaucracy 
had said was impossible ; and how the Austrian 
communique next day had borne witness to 
the feat. 

"The result n asked. 

The result was two months* imprisonment 
for the captain and his removal from aviation 
to the cavalry, which has little or nothing to 
do. 

The captain knew that Signor Caproni was 



The Airman 157 

telling me the story, for he glanced over once 
and smiled. Then, being unable to tell him 
what I thought of him, and his achievement, 
and bureaucracy in all countries and ages, I 
just lifted my glass to him and pledged him. 

After all, I think I told him; for he soon 
remarked to a neighbor, and the remark was 
translated for me, that the only way to win 
a war was to have no government behind it. 
He was different from other airmen; he was 
heavier about the jaw, thicker in the neck and 
nose, and sternly determined in the mouth. 

I delighted in hearing him talk, for his 
voice was deep, strong, coarse, but soft and 
low. Perhaps you believe that a contradic- 
tion, but you should have heard the voice. I 
could imagine him in a purple bordered tunic 
and gold laced sandals on the Via Sacra, or 
in greaves and plumed helmet on the plains 
of Philippi. 

At the same table that night sat a young 
fair-haired lieutenant — there are rnany fair- 
haired and blue-eyed Italians — who had been 
over Pola many times since the impossible be- 
came possible, and he smiled at our colloquy. 
I observed that his eyes were very bloodshot, 
and I knew it was not from drink. Italians 
are abstemious. 

Perhaps, however, the most adventurous 



158 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

spirit at that board was the engineer himself, 
Caproni. Not merely during this war, but for 
the last eight or nine years has this young 
dreamer been flying and building fliers. Since 
his country went to war with the central 
powers, he has cherished a plan for killing 
the war, which he has dinned into the ears 
of officialdom, until at last they are beginning 
to listen. At first his friends said: 

"Caproni, you are a fool, a dreamer. You 
are a professorial sort of being." 

To-day they have come his way, and he can- 
not work fast enough to help the allied gov- 
ernments carry out his plan. It is very simple, 
this plan, as he explained it to me: 

"To win the war, we must have an over- 
whelming superiority in artillery and muni- 
tions. To accomplish that we must not merely 
increase our own stock, we must diminish the 
enemy's. If we can demolish his sources of 
supply, and interrupt his flow of guns and 
shells, even for a short time, a few weeks, 
we can break his lines. 

"We know where his factories are, just as 
we know where his submarine bases are. How 
can we reach and disorganize them? With 
heavy planes in the air, carrying large sup- 
plies of bombs." 

Certainly; plain as the beak on a birdman's 



The Airman 159 

face! That is the way the war will finish. 
D'Artagnan will do it in the air. It is a 
matter of riiathematics. 

War is an industry. The man who has the 
most planes will win the war. Everybody 
sees it now, and the governments, our own 
among them, are buying Caproni's big biplanes 
and triplanes, triple engined, 6oo-horsepower, 
capable of carrying three men and a ton or 
so of explosives and of coming home with 
one engine disabled or two engines disabled. 

Furthermore, other nations are building the 
same sort of planes and adopting Caproni's 
idea. Italy cannot meet the demand for 
planes. She cannot get the raw materials, 
which she must import. The ships are not 
sailing fast enough for Italy. The world, 
however, is moving fast enough Caproni's 
way, and the patrician face of this young en- 
gineer of thirty-four or thirty-five wears the 
quiet smile of the man who has, with the aid 
of circumstances, conquered the stubbornness 
of governments; and his big, dark eyes look 
away absently, as if dreaming still more for 
the future. 

"Oh, yes, it can be done," he said to me. 
"And after the war, when we have time, it 
will be done. It will take about four stages 
to cross the Atlantic; the first from Milan to 



160 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

Portugal, the second to the Azores, the third 
to New Iceland, the fourth to New York. We 
are preparing for it now. The triplane will 
do it with mail and passengers." 

At the time I thought I would look up "New 
Iceland." I supposed my geography was at 
fault. I think now it was his English. He 
could not have meant Iceland, nor Newfound- 
land. I think he was feeling for some name 
in the Bermudas. At all events, the four 
stages will be found, and the "nations' airy 
navies, grappling in the central blue," will give 
way to the "argosies of magic sails, pilots of 
the purple twilight dropping down with costly 
bales." 

Neither need it be so expensive a mode of 
travel, nor take many years to develop. Be- 
fore I die I expect to sail to Europe high over 
the waves of the Atlantic, where seasickness 
cannot corrupt, nor censorship officials break 
through and steal my notes and photographs, 
as they did the other day. 

Italy began this war, as we have done, 
practically without knowledge of aviation. 
To-day she holds the Austrian airmen in the 
hollow of her hand, is making airships for 
us and for England, and is teaching some hun- 
dreds of our young Americans to fly. She 
has inventive genius. 



The Airman 161 

I saw Marconi, one day, driving along the 
streets of Turin, looking very young and 
handsome in his naval uniform. Italy has 
also administrative genius to a degree that has 
astonished the world. She has made good in 
this war, and not least in aviation. 

Among all these nations it is taken for 
granted that the young American boy who 
undertakes to fly will succeed. Quite a per- 
centage of their own young men, it seems, 
could never learn, and they try to weed out 
these by rigid nerve tests and the like. But 
the sports and the outdoor life of the Ameri- 
can lad, like those of the English, only to a 
greater degree, seem to fit him for flying. 

In France they do not take an American 
through the slow degrees of patient training 
through which they take their own lads. They, 
in a way, toss him up into the air and let 
him try his wings. The English are inclined 
to do the same with their own boys, and one 
wonders if this is not the reason for so many 
casualties in British flying schools. 

The French and the Italians are very care- 
ful in their training of new fliers; every 
school machine is fitted with two sets of con- 
trols, identical, and coupled; every move of 
the teacher is felt and imitated by the pupil 
through a long continued course. The com- 



162 ^j Facing the Hindenburg Line 

manders of these stations informed me that 
they very seldom have accidents. 

The physical examinations, too, have elim- 
inated many of the unfit and reduced casual- 
ties. The candidates are tested not only 
as to soundness of eyes, ears, heart, lungs, all 
the evident neccessities, but also as to mental 
reactions, sense of location, nerve control. 

For example, they are placed upon a re- 
volving table, blindfolded, whirled around 
several times and asked to indicate the points 
of the compass. Water is poured in the ears 
to test the resistance of the drums. They stand 
barefoot on one leg and are told to hop back- 
wards along a line. 

They perform various other ludicrous 
stunts in a state of nudity. They consider 
that much of this is all poppycock; but if it 
saves the lives of a few lads here and there it 
is well worth while. To be sure, that ace of 
aces, Guynemer — the French call an airman 
an ace when he has brought down five of the 
enemy — could stand none of these tests. 

He was physically unfit, according to all the 
rules. He was a consumptive, weighed less 
than a hundred pounds, and knew he could 
only live a year or two at best. He accounted 
for more than fifty Hun planes, just because 



The Airman 163 

he was a man in ten million and was selling 
the fag-end of his life as dearly as might be. 

What a shudder went up over France — ^yes, 
over allied Europe the other day when he went 
down. I heard the news several days before 
it was printed, from our own airmen in Paris ; 
but we could not believe it, so often had the 
rumor of the terrible little man's death gone 
out. His father and mother do not believe it 
yet, but are waiting for him in the little home 
in Compiegne, to which he used always to fly 
when he came back from the front, like a 
bird to his mountain. 

Many other fathers and mothers there are 
who will wait and wait in vain. How much 
better, though, for Guynemer! He was the 
most real D'Artagnan of them all. 

America is going into aviation in earnest. 
I could tell many things about orders placed 
by our government in foreign factories; about 
many square miles of territory acquired for 
fields and 'dromes ; about the training places of 
many of our lads in allied lands; but these 
things are best left undiscussed. 



XVI 
UP IN A BIPLANE 

MY first flight in an airplane came quite 
by accident, as so many good things 
in life seem to have a way of doing. 
I had long been seeking such an opportunity, 
and once or twice it had been offered me; 
but the exigencies of work and other engage- 
ments had always prevented. Now this ap- 
parent accident carries with it some, to me, 
very interesting facts. 

The Italian officer is the most courtly mili- 
tary man in Europe, and the most kindly. 
Nobody so punctilious in etiquette as he; no- 
body so careful of his appearence, his ways 
and his manners. 

If he enters a railway carriage, a restaurant, 
or any public place, he stands by the door and 
salutes all the occupants. If a high officer 
enters a public room where a number of other 
officers are sitting they all arise and stand at 
attention. If someone enters with a woman, 
every man arises, no matter whether he is in 
the midst of soup or dessert, and stands until 
the woman is seated. It requires a great deal 

164 



Up in a Biplane 165 

of watchfulness and agility on the part of a 
stranger to keep up with these forms, although 
it all seems easy and second nature to the 
courteous Italians. 

Furthermore, these southern men of Europe 
have a genius for administration and for get- 
ting things smoothly done. The rest of official 
Europe is bound hand and foot with red tape ; 
but if red tape gets in the way of Italian 
officers, so much the worse for the red tape. 

I found this out on this wise: I was tired 
from a long journey and feeling a bit ill. I 
decided, therefore, to drop off at a wayside 
city and rest; besides, I had heard it was a 
beautiful and interesting city and possessed 
certain munition and airplane factories and 
airdromes. I drove to the hotel in the middle 
of the afternoon and went to bed, telling the 
porter meantime to call up the office of the 
air commandant and make an appointment 
for me next day. 

Refreshed by an afternoon and night of 
rest, I went next morning to see the com- 
mandant. He was very sorry, but I must have 
authorization from Rome or from the com- 
mando supremo, the headquarters of the 
army, before I could enter the factories or 
the air sheds. I had expected it to be so, and 
not greatly disappointed, thought swiftly of 



166 Pacing the Hindenburg Line 

visiting the museum of the town, like tourists 
in happier days. So I gathered up my creden- 
tials, assured the commandant that I appre- 
ciated his courtesy, and was about to back out 
of the office, doing plenty of bowing on the 
way. 

"Stop," said the interpreter, for we talked 
through a medium. "The colonel says that 
regulations are positive and that he must have 
a permission from the headquarters before ad- 
mitting visitors; but as you are on your way 
to the commando supremo, if you will promise 
him to apply for a permission when you get 
there he will let you go into the factories and 
'dromes right now !" 

I call that a masterly way to handle red 
tape. I readily gave the promise and later 
executed it, too, to the letter. 

Then was summoned a young lieutenant 
who spoke English, then a motor car, and then 
followed the round of the factories and air 
sheds, where I saw the newest types of Italian 
cars, some of which have not even been 
heralded yet, met the men whose names have 
become famous through their engines ; certain 
great fliers, whose achievements the press has 
since been trumpeting; and examined planes 
which have established records of late. I was 
going on to another city that afternoon and 



Up in a Biplane 167 

as the young officer put me down at my hotel 
he said: 

**You will find someone to meet you there." 

I thought no more about the remark and 
ambled out of the station at the second city, 
looking for a taxi, but suddenly, just out of 
the door, a young, black mustached Apollo 
came close up to me and saluted as if I were 
a field marshal. 

Then he welcomed me, conducted me to a 
military car, waiting, bowed me in and drove 
me to the best hotel. I was sort of dazed 
and felt as if I were obtaining money under 
false pretenses, or taking candy from chil- 
dren; I was overwhelmed by my own im- 
portance; nobody in Europe had ever con- 
sidered me so important before; and I was 
bowed down by the responsibility of living 
up to my own new significance. 

Then followed twenty-eight or thirty hours 
of most delightful companionship with some 
of the ablest men of Italy, visits to more fac- 
tories, the examination of more engines, planes 
and plans, the meeting and the memorable 
dinner with Signor Caproni and his friends 
and, to cap all, the flight in the biplane in the 
golden afternoon. We shall all of us soon 
know that airplaning ordinarily is just as safe 
as taxicabing. 



168 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

I suppose others have written of their sen- 
sations during their first flight, but I do not 
remember having read anything of this sort. 
Perhaps it may not interest others to read 
of mine, but it would have interested me to 
read of someone else's before my own experi- 
ence, so I take the chance. 

It was quite warm that afternoon, and, as 
I stood by the big Caproni, with overalls above 
all my clothing, fur coat on top of that, a 
knitted hood over head, ears, neck, and a tough, 
thick, heavy helmet over that, the perspiration 
began to soak through all these thicknesses. 

Then my kind friends remembered, after 
getting out the machine, tuning her up, and 
swathing me in many plies of wool and fur, 
that they must get a permission for me to fly, 
so they went off to the telephone to unwind 
the necessary red tape. I had no uneasiness, 
however, as I already knew the fine Italian 
hand's ability to unwind red tape; and I felt 
sure that Engineer Caproni, standing smiling 
and bareheaded near at hand, would manage 
somehow, in emergency. 

My Turkish bath was going merrily forward 
when at last word was given me to climb in. 
It is some distance up to the nose of a big 
biplane; and the costume is not conducive to 
agility; but I managed. Then I found I could 



Up in a Biplane 169 

not get my legs into the small space in front 
of the seat in the bows of the boat which they 
pointed out to me; and, if I tried to sit on 
the low back of the seat, the strap would 
not go around me to buckle me in. 

I began to despair; and because of the roar 
of the three big engines, two hundred horse- 
power each, I could not make known my em- 
barrassments, except by signs. The pilot, 
however, seemed to understand. He was a 
tough, weather-beaten birdman, with assurance 
in his eye and the usual beak nose. I had 
sized him up long ago; and he had my com- 
plete confidence. He motioned to me to climb 
over him, and to stand in the middle of the 
plane between two tanks. I did so, and found 
it an elevated, airy and altogether satisfactory- 
position. There I stood throughout the 
flight. 

The birdman opened and closed his throttle 
and his spark with a resulting crescendo and 
diminuendo, but never a pianissimo; then he 
glanced around, grasped my hand, now en- 
cased in his own gloves that he had taken off 
and loaned me, pointed to the propellers and 
cautioned me against trying to stop them with 
my fingers. Even a cap flying off can smash 
a propeller and bring a plane crashing to 
earth. 



170 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

Then he settled himself in his seat, twisted 
his trunk and shoulders as if trying his own 
freedom of movement and hooked up some- 
thing with his foot or his "joystick" that 
started us lightly bumping over the grass. 

If anybody expects to be seasick in an air- 
plane he has another expectation coming. This 
first little spin over the grass is the only thing 
approaching the motion of a boat that he will 
experience. Indeed, even this is more like the 
motion of a rarefied and denatured motor car 
than that of a boat. We airily footed it clear 
across the field and turned around to get the 
light wind in our faces; then we headed for 
the airshed, gradually increased our speed as 
if bent on bumping into the sheds and half 
way across began to rise. 

I was watching intently for the moment 
of leaving the ground, so as to analyze the 
sensation, but there was no sensation to an- 
alyze. The light fantastic touch upon the 
bumpy greensward just seemed to die away, 
that's all. In two seconds the airshed was 
passed by, then the telephone poles and wires, 
then the trees, then houses. 

There was no sensation of giddy height. I 
am not cool and keen about sitting in fifth- 
story windows or looking down from church 
steeples. I would be a dismal failure as a 



Up in a Biplane 171 

chimney sweep or steeple jack, or even a line- 
man; for my head turns at any considerable 
height; but, on my word, there was nothing 
of this dread of high position in this experi- 
ence, though we flew to about six thousand 
feet. I had been assured beforehand that this 
was true and was not disappointed. 

My "innards" did rise once, however, and 
that was when the pilot "banked" all of a 
sudden, that is leaned way to one side, brought 
his plane heeling over to leeward, like a sail- 
boat in a sudden squall, and made me feel as 
if I were standing, like a fly, on a vertical 
wall. I had supposed we would sail straight 
away for our objective, and had forgotten 
that he would probably circle and climb, like 
a wild duck arising from a lake. The next 
time he "banked" I was "laying" for him and 
the sensation was nothing but enjoyable. 
After all, courage, as someone has said, is 
only the abiUty to do over again what you 
have done before. 

At last the pilot turned to me, pointed to 
one of his innumerable gauges, and held up 
his fingers, a certain number of them, and 
tried to make me understand our height. I 
nodded and grinned through my goggles as if 
I thoroughly understood. Anything to make 



172 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

him turn around, get his hands on those con- 
trols again and attend to his business. 

I'd run my end of the boat all right if he'd 
run his, no matter what the height. Then, 
as if satisfied, he turned back and set her nose 
for the distant point to which we were to sail. 
The city came sweeping and streaming under 
our feet. I had been told to watch out for 
the cathedral, — one of the biggest and grandest 
in Europe — but I forgot it for a while; then 
when I sought for it all squares looked alike 
to me. 

I wondered if some day, from a great height, 
we may look down and see factories indis- 
tinguishable from cathedrals, hovels and 
palaces. 

I was cold enough now, and the perspiration 
had turned to ammonia or something equally 
volatile and shivery. The roar of the three 
engines, one on each side and one behind me, 
was like the roar of Niagara underneath the 
falls; and besides that, my ears were bubbling 
from the altitude. I was deaf for ten minutes 
when we came down, and half afraid I should 
never hear again. 

The pilot was not; for he conversed with 
others, I knew, in even tones. I could see 
his lips move. A thousand feet or so on a 
railway or a funicular always gives me the 



Up in a Biplane 173 

bubbles. When I spoke of it afterwards, the 
lieutenant, who went up with us, only laughed 
and said it was the noise of the engines, but 
I knew better. 

The rush through the air was the only in- 
dication of high speed. Standing as I was, 
I had to brace myself, and felt all the time 
as if some powerful hand was trying to push 
me down by tilting my head back. The 
helmet, I was sure, was two or three stories 
too high; and I was momentarily afraid it 
would fly off and play hob with the propellers ; 
though I knew it was strapped under my chin 
with a good strong strap. Excellent exercise 
this for the muscles of the neck. 

The fields looked like little green squares, 
as I expected; and the roads like bits of white 
channels all tangled up. Where a straight 
piece of roadway ran, it was only a bit of 
braid, a sixteenth of an inch wide. Then sud- 
denly one roadway looked wider, for there 
was a rat running along in it. 

My, how that rat did get up and hump 
himself! He passed all other vermin and in- 
sects on the road, and he ran with wonderful 
smoothness and rapidity, parallel with our 
course. I knew he was going some, because 
we were going some, and he seemed almost 
to keep up with us. 



174 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

Then I reasoned that he was, of course, a 
motor car, and I actually laughed out loud, 
though I didn't even hear myself. There are 
some places in which your nerves are strung 
up and you are ready to laugh at anything or 
nothing. It's that way in school, in church, 
or in an airplane. 

"Here, you, pilot, keep your hands on those 
joy sticks, and your feet on the soft pedal!" 
I had confidence in the captain, yes, but not 
too much confidence. I didn't want him to 
neglect his business and lean over the side 
looking around too much. "Here, boy, quit 
monkeying with those levers. She's doing very 
well. If you go to changing things she may 
balk on us and make us come down before 
our journey is over. She's doing tip top, I 
say; let well enough alone." 

One can't help thinking impertinent things 
the first time one is up; one's mind is too 
everlastingly active. 

Then we pierced into clouds. They rolled 
all around us like mist, like fog; and soon we 
emerged into the blue above them. The sky 
seemed smaller and closer than I had ever 
seen it before. Above the clouds on a moun- 
tain gives no such feeling; for there is the 
mountain to go by. 

Here there is no basis of comparison; and 



Up in a Biplane 175 

the ring of the horizon seems very constricted, 
the blue canopy above, very close to one's head. 
I could think of no adequate reason for this, 
and decided at last that the impression was 
wholly psychological, imaginative. The lieu- 
tenant, however, told me afterwards that he 
always had the same feeling above the clouds, 
and he was sure it was not merely psy- 
chological. 

By and by the pilot turned around and made 
signs that it was a very misty day, and that 
the landscape was shut out. I didn't mind, if 
he didn't; I was very well pleased with the 
skyscape. 

Then he did the first impolite thing I ever 
saw an Italian officer do. I suppose, after all, 
he tried to prepare me for it. He shut off those 
three engines and dived. I was sure he was 
trying to throw me out of the concern head 
foremost. 

We pitched nose down, like a ship from the 
top of a high comber, when she buries bow- 
sprit and forecastle in the brine. It was like 
Uncle Ezra's first drop in a high speed ele- 
vator; it was like the roller coaster, when you 
leave your dining apparatus at the top of the 
incline; it was like the times when Uncle Bill 
used to "run under" you in the swing when 
you were six years old and impressionable. 



176 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

I was sure that the macaroni of that day's 
luncheon was left hanging on the clouds; for 
we soon shot out of them, and the green earth 
came rushing up to meet us. The silence was 
oppressive. 

"Here, captain. For heaven's sake turn on 
those engines. They may never work again. 
Do try them, captain, there's a good fellow!" 

He did try them, and they ripped off three 
yards of cloth in no time; then he shut them 
off again. Then he ripped off nine yards of 
calico, and silence again. We circled and 
settled leisurely, calmly, floatingly. Other 
planes were in our path, beside us, above us, 
I counted thirteen in two minutes. 

"Can you see 'em, old fellow? Don't let's 
bump into them. I'd hate to kill any of these 
nice Italian aviators." 

We sailed over a field where a family was 
loading a hay wagon. We were so close above 
them that I could see "pa's" eyes and "ma's" 
teeth and "Sal's" bare feet, as they looked up 
and waved their hands. I thought we were 
going to take the top off that load of hay and 
lodge our wheels in the hedge just beyond, but 
we cleared both. 

Then we tilted our nose slightly up, and I 
could not record the moment when we touched 
earth. Now we polkaed up to the airshed, to 
which we were bringing a new machine. 



XVII 
OUR ARMY OVERSEAS 

WE were within sound of the guns once 
more, lulled to sleep by their rumble 
and awakened in the morning by- 
American bugles sounding reveille. By the 
time I was out on the village street the lads 
had had their breakfast and were swinging 
along toward their day's work at the training 
grounds. 

In advance was a pick and shovel outfit, 
followed by infantry with steel helmets and 
full packs. After all the foreign troops I had 
watched, these home huskies looked good to 
me. They are slim legged, red and brown 
faced, spring heeled lads with a jauntiness of 
step all their own. 

They show up well on the boulevards of 
Paris, along the railways, where they are at 
work running trains and studying block sys- 
tems and building lines, on station platforms, 
in fields and village streets. Perhaps I should 
not say "streets"; for I inquired my way to 
divisional headquarters from one of them, and 

177 



178 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

he replied in his broad southern drawl: "Up 
this first alley — y'all can't miss it!" 

He pointed to the principal thoroughfare of 
the municipality and called it "alley." It 
sounded very much like home. Then his last 
phrase, "You can't miss it," sounded very 
British; for after the most intricate directions 
given you in England by an obliging person, 
"third turning on the left, fourth on the right, 
bearing all the while north by east," the 
Englishman invariably adds, in the cheeriest 
of voices: "You cawn't miss it!" 

We had had a never-to-be-forgotten ride. 
We followed the winding curve of the clear, 
blue Marne; we noted the lines along which 
the first great plunge of the German forces 
were made; we saw where they were headed 
off, pushed back ; we stood where their desper- 
ate stand was made and the great battle was 
fought upon which hung the fate of civiliza- 
tion. 

Then we traveled miles of roadway bor- 
dered by the scattered and clustered graves 
of heroic men, buried where they fell. Here 
was one with its wooden cross and its French 
flag in the middle of a field all alone; here 
was one just inside the wire fencing of the 
railway right of way; here were two in a 
little grove of trees, sleeping beneath the 



Our Army Overseas 179 

Union Jack, side by side; here half a dozen 
in the corner of a sheep pasture; yonder, three 
or four surrounded by plowed ground. 

On every road-crossing and on every rail- 
way station were printed names that, for three 
years, we have read in communiques over and 
over until they have become household words. 
Here, on the river bank, was a famous 
shambles; here, in this village, was fought out 
one of the most stubborn small actions; this 
railway station is denuded of glass in its 
trainshed — the work of aerial bombs — and the 
rain pours down as if the platforms were out 
of doors, while passengers stand with um- 
brellas and waterproofs dripping. 

Yonder are walls pitted and scarred with 
rifle and shell fire; and in the fields, hobbling 
about with tools, or on the roadways stump- 
ing along by carts, are the remnants of cannon 
fodder chewed up and spat out from the maw 
of Mars. 

The Americans there seemed to be mostly 
southerners. The brogue of Alabama, Ten- 
nessee and the Carolinas, anywhere below the 
Mason-Dixon line, seemed the predominant 
strain in the greeting from the men as they 
shook hands with us after the evening meet- 
ing at the Y. M. C. A. tent. The officers, too, 



180 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

that I met seemed to hail largely from the 
South. 

Our very first experience in this area one 
night was a truly southern meeting at the 
station gates. It was raining heavily, and the 
telegram announcing our arrival from Paris 
to the Y. M. officials probably did not arrive 
until the week after. So we were a pair of 
wet and lost souls, until an American officer, 
bundled in waterproofs, drawled out: 

"Where y'all goin'? Come, get into my 
car. Yes, throw your baggage in. Come 
right along." 

My seat was beside the sergeant driving the 
Cadillac, and I said to him : 

"The major is a southerner, isn't he?" 

"Humph!" snorted the sergeant. "He's a 
major general!" 

To give still more the atmosphere of Dixie, 
there is a big negro cook in a certain company. 
Down at the French port, where the boys 
landed, he saw another gentleman of color 
strolling about, and immediately breezed up 
to him as to a brother and opened up, "Boy, 
howdy !" The second negro replied in French. 
They stood eyeing each other. Then they got 
excited, talked rapidly, each in the tongue to 
which he was born, and louder all the time, 
as they gesticulated wildly. Finally the Dixie 



Our Army Overseas 181 

cook turned away and, with infinite disgust, 
said to the paymaster, standing near: 

"Humph! That boy — ^he ain't no nigger 
nohow !" 

This big cook has a voice Hke a bass violin 
and called out to every lad a half block away, 
"Boy, howdy," as nearly as I can make out 
and spell the vernacular greeting current in 
the American army. 

Just outside the tent where I was visiting 
was another negro, a chauffeur, tinkering with 
a red Triangle car and explaining its working 
to two American girls with Y. M. C. A. badges 
upon their arms, who were probably to take 
charge of this machine, or to work in some 
canteen near by. 

Across the road were suppply company men 
butchering a hog, and a supply officer sitting 
on horseback overseeing the job. The cooking 
and eating seemed all to be done in the streets 
and the rain. The men are billeted in barns, 
haymows, anywhere they can find shelter, in 
quarters that no British Tommy would long en- 
dure. For mine, I drew a luxurious billet in the 
estaminet, under the roof, with no window, 
but a bit of a skylight open for air. 

I saw van loads of portable huts on the 
railway sidings as I went along — if they will 



182 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

only get there some day ! Boats from America 
is what is needed, just as Lloyd George said: 

"Ships, more ships, and then ships!" 

I have reason to believe that American en- 
gineers will lay the trackage of our supply 
lines fast enough if they can only get the 
stuff to lay. But nobody can make railways 
without bricks, straw and rails. 

I must say, however, that the American 
boys bear their discomforts with as little com- 
plaining as men could. I looked into a stable 
where twenty-eight men were quartered, found 
them cleaning their rifles, boots and braSs but- 
tons. 

"Comfortable?" I asked. "Fine, sir," came 
the answer. "Lots better than a pup tent in 
the cactus!" 

"Any sick?" 

"I'm the only one, sir," answered one rather 
pale. "J^st got out of hospital to-day. Not 
enough blood and a touch of rheumatism." 

I could get no word of complaint out of 
them or any man I talked with in the Y. M. 
hut. They were anxious only about one thing, 
and that was to get up into the line and fight. 

"We're ready now!" they cried. "Let us 
at 'em!" 

We would call out sometimes to a thousand 
Sammies in the Y. M. C. A. audience : 



Our Army Overseas 183 

"Can you fellows sing Tack up your troubles 
in your old kit bag?' " 

Then there would invariably come back a 
roar: 

"We ain't got no troubles!" 

The Y. M. C. A. was doing its best, with 
a few huts, some tents and a limited number 
of motor trucks. Much of their material 
equipment has been greatly delayed in transit. 
In spite of this, however, twelve stations have 
been opened in this advanced line, covering a 
stretch of some twenty miles. 

The huts are overcrowded all the time, and 
will soon be replaced with larger and better 
ones, the present ones being turned over to the 
army for barracks. 

There are three of four pianos in the 
huts here, and more arriving. 

One must remember in estimating the 
promptness of the Y. M., that it was informed 
last spring that no American troops would be 
sent over here until fall; then suddenly, under 
urgent requests from the Allies, plans were 
changed, and the troops are pouring across 
with their supplies as rapidly as ships can be 
found to bring them. 

Considering all the circumstances, there- 
fore, it appears to me that the red triangle 
is doing wonderfully well; and the soldiers 



184 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

said to me: "I don't know what we'd do 
without this hut to come to. I guess we'd 
die!" 

The health of the boys was excellent, aside 
from injuries by accident in bomb practice and 
the like, where the risks are inevitable. 

There was practically no illness. 

None of them, of course, were in the 
trenches ; although the officers go up in batches 
to observe. I talked with one of our captains 
who was with the Foreign Legion, the other 
day, at the big push beyond Verdun. His eyes 
glowed as he told of the experience. 

Sanitation seemed well looked after, and 
certain measures of prophylaxis are being 
rigidly enforced to prevent incapacitation of 
men in the fashion in which some of the 
armies suffered earlier in the war. The fact, 
too, that the camps are rural prevents much 
of this danger to our American troops. 

It would be better, however, if our men had 
less money. The officers feel that these young 
lads are too heavily paid, or at least, that they 
are allowed to draw too much of their pay. 

The French soldiers and the French people 
are not accustomed to seeing so much money 
flashed about. Prices are shot to pieces. 
Farmers' wives, good women, are subjected to 



Our Army Overseas 185 

a fearful temptation in these days of want for 
their families and themselves. 

Soldiers do not need much money; there 
are very few places in which they can legiti- 
mately use it; the officers urge them to put it 
in war bonds; the Y. M. C. A. offers to send 
any man's money home for him; but neither 
can do more than exercise moral suasion. 
They are recommending to the government, 
I understand, that some adequate measures be 
devised for the corrections of these dangers. 

They are a lively lot, these boys. They do 
not know yet the camp songs that every British 
Tommy knows, and that are ringing in the 
English music halls, songs even of American 
origin, some of them; but they quickly learn 
them, and there is nothing that promotes 
morale more effectively than good singing. 

I have a doggerel rhyme composed by a lad 
billeted in a haymow with fourteen others. 
He sings the praises of the whole fourteen by 
name, and tells of the qualities and exploits 
of each in a manner that reminds one of the 
rhymes emanating from British trenches. 
Here is one verse of it; and it is noteworthy 
that the name mentioned is of German origin : 

First of all is Corporal Weiss, 
He's been with us quite a while; 

And when it comes to cracking jokes, 
He can make the devil smile. 



186 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

When we think of the number of German 
names that will come over with our army — I 
a half dozen occur in this barrack rhyme — we 
can only wonder what the French police will 
do with them all. 

We American travellers have consumed time 
enough ourselves with our plainly English 
patronymics, in consulting and being exam- 
ined by officers of the secret service, both 
English and French, to render us apprehensive 
about our soldiers. Perhaps, after all, the onus 
of responsibility will rest upon America her- 
self. 

One day, one of our boys with a German 
name, stood watching a group of Boche pris- 
oners file by, when suddenly his eyes met 
those of his own brother among the Huns. 
The American soldier shouted his brother's 
name; and this violated the rule that none but 
their captains may communicate with prison- 
ers. He found himself, therefore, in diffi- 
culties with the French. 

When, however, he explained the circum- 
stances, an exception was made, and he was 
allowed to hold a few minutes' conversation 
with his brother. Then the prisoner moved 
away with the file, and the great gulf of the 
world war yawned again between the two. 

Out there in the village street — beg pardon, 



Our Army Overseas 187 

I should say "alley" — was ranged a battery of 
machine guns of the crack machine gun com- 
pany of our army. I suppose there was a 
score of the guns. 

I was told that the men of this branch, all 
of whom were down on the Mexican border, 
were in the best physical condition of any of 
our troops, and were ready then, trained to 
the point, to go to the front. Our French 
neighbors — the populace, I mean — wonder why 
we do not start at once for the trenches. They 
say that they themselves had to go at once, 
why do not we? 

They do not realize that it takes more 
than men; it takes artillery, commissary, an 
elaborate preparation, before we can go for- 
ward and take over our part of the line. 
When we do go forward, I am told, it will be 
in force, and in such a force as to be felt. 
Meantime, give us time, and boats, and boats, 
and boats. 

I saw a number of other machine gun com- 
panies and talked with their officers. They 
are enthusiastic, both about the discipline of 
their men and their marksmanship. 

I heard varied reports as to how the men 
are behaving themselves. On the whole, how- 
ever, after careful listening to evidence, I was 
inclined to believe that drinking was not ex- 



188 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

cessive. Pure water is sometimes scarce, and 
the men can hardly be expected to forego the 
native wines altogether. A few men got drunk 
at nights, but only a few, and those always 
the same ones. A few were laid up in hos- 
pital through their own fault, but only a few. 

Taken for all in all, I believe our men will 
make a record comparable to that of the 
British in France, which is a record that will 
be an everlasting credit to the British Empire. 

One night I strolled into the little cemetery 
near one of . the camps and found two new 
graves, marked with the names, companies and 
regiments of two American boys. These are 
the first two to lie asleep under French soil. 
I learned, upon inquiry, that one of these had 
been drowned while bathing in a neighboring 
stream, while the other had shot himself, dur- 
ing the night, not long ago. 

I must confess to a strong tug at the heart 
strings as I thought of the hundreds and 
thousands of our boys who, in my judgment, 
will sleep in this far land before we have done 
our utmost duty here. 



XVIII 

AMERICANS SITTING IN THE 
SHADOWS 

HE was a homesick looking lad. I sold 
him something or other at the can- 
teen counter; then he drifted over 
and sat down against the wall of the hut. The 
place was full of men, but there was a vacant 
chair next to him. I watched his downcast 
features for a while, and then sat down beside 
him. 

"Ever get homesick over here?" I asked. 

"Me? Homesick? That's the least of my 
troubles." 

"What are your troubles, then?" 

"It's my blankety blank company. If I was 
in a decent company I'd never worry." 

"What's the matter with 'em?" 

"Oh, they think they know it all, and they 
don't know nothing. They are most of them 
new recruits; if they'd all been down at the 
border and seen some service they'd be dif- 
ferent." 

I was still searching for the real trouble for 

189 



190 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

I was convinced it lay deeper. By and by I 
got the facts. The boy was from Wisconsin. 
His father had fought for Germany in '70. 
His uncle was now a German prisoner in 
French hands, and the boy had seen and talked 
with him at the seaport 

He had also recently received a letter from 
his folks back in Wisconsin saying that he need 
never come home again, since he had taken up 
arms against the fatherland. More than that, 
his comrades in the company were none too 
cordial with him on account of his German 
name. 

"It makes no difference. I'm going to stick. 
I'm an American, whatever my people were, 
and I*m going to see it through. I*m just 
waiting until I see whether I get promotion. 
The sergeant is recommending me for a stripe. 
If I don't get it — well, I can hold my own with 
any man in the blank'd company, and the first 
one that says anything to me I'm going to biff 
him." 

Just then three breezy young "Sammies" — 
that is the name by which the American sol- 
diers are going to be known over here, just as 
the English are "Tommies;" there was much 
grave editorial discussion in London on this 
subject; it would not do to say Yankees, or 
Yanks, as this might offend the Americans ; so 



Americans Sitting in the Shadows 191 

"Sammies'* was adopted, from Uncle Sam, 
and Sammies they will remain — well, I say, 
three young lads came breezing into the hut 
and making straight for my friend opened up 
on him: 

"Hello, Herman; by gosh, I haven't seen 
you since we left Brownsville. WhereVe 
you " 

"Hello, Shorty; hello, Bill; hello, Jim. Fm 
sure glad to see you. When'd you land here ?" 

"Just now. WeVe been wiring the new 
headquarters for General Pershing, about so 
many kilometers from here. We landed 
at " 

"Say, Shorty," said the German lad wist- 
fully, "how can I get transferred to your com- 
pany ?" 

Then followed a stream of border reminis- 
cence, and Herman's face gradually cleared 
and brightened. At last I got up, knowing he 
was now in good hands, and walked away, 
while he waved his hand to me and smiled, 
saying, "See you to-morrow." 

To-day at mess one boy, who goes by the 
nickname of "Dutch," was quietly munching 
in a corner when some fellow cried out: "Hey, 
Dutch, what are you, German or Holland- 
Dutch?" "I'm German! I'm no flat-headed 
Dutchman!" growled the lad. 



192 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

"Got any folks in Germany?" 

"Yes, I did have, anyway. Three or four 
uncles and seven cousins. Most of 'em all 
killed off, though." 

"Too bad, too bad," said somebody con- 
ventionally. 

"Oh, I don't know," replied Dutch. "Saved 
me from having to kill 'em." 

Under the apparently flippant words lay a 
whole world of grim pathos. 

It is rather hard lines for German-American 
boys in the army; they are between two mill- 
stones. Yet it is a strange fact that many of 
the non-commissioned officers are either Ger- 
man, Polish, Hungarian or Russian Jews. The 
men remark about it and declare that, if the 
sergeants and corporals would give their real 
names, you would find most of them ending in 
"ski" and "off" and the like. "Why," said one 
of the boys to me, "they can't give orders in 
English!" I myself inquired my way from 
one of them one evening, and I could scarcely 
understand his reply. These lads of foreign 
birth feel that they have to make good, are 
devoted to duty, punctilious, ambitious and 
anxious for the extra pay. 

Much has been written about the ingenuity 
of Tommy Atkins in communicating with his 
new French neighbors; well, the American is 



Americans Sitting in the Shadows 193 

not lacking in ingenuity, whatever else he may 
lack. I was dining at the officers' mess of a 
certain company, one evening, just after the 
new steel helmets had been issued. One big 
lieutenant, who had evidently come up through 
the ranks, a rolUicking black-mustached, hail- 
fellow-well-met type of fellow, who smiled per- 
petually from ear to ear and showed a mouth 
full of fine white teeth — ^by Jove, what a re- 
lief it is to see so many beautiful teeth in men's 
heads as I see these days! — insisted upon 
wearing his helmet at the table. 

He had no more than got seated until he 
began to roar: "Mam'selle! Gertrude! Eat! 
Oui, oui! I talk French. Oui, oui means 'all 
gone !' Gertrude !" 

When Gertrude appeared — a smiling bru- 
nette, an Italian girl, in a French estaminet, 
the big llieutenant carried on all the conversa- 
tion with her in this lingo and with his ges- 
tures in spite of the fact that an interpreter, 
a handsome French officer, sat there engaging 
in the universal laughter. The lieutenant got 
up and moved about the place, thrusting his 
nose into the pie — glorious pie it was — tossing 
his cigarette stub out the window, and along 
with it a string of greetings to women and 
children who chanced to pass. Everybody got 
a share of his attentions and — ^his French! 



194 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

I am reminded of a sign once displayed in a 
Paris cafe window: "Wanted, American wait- 
ers who can speak French." 

Someone asked the restaurateur if he hadn't 
plenty of French waiters who could speak 
French. He replied, "Mais out, I want waiters 
zat can speak ze kind of French zat ze Ameri- 
cans speak!" 

One middle-aged corporal, the other after- 
noon, hung around the Y. M. canteen counter 
until closing time, and the secretary started 
away for dinner. The corporal followed, and 
then the secretary realized that the man had 
something on his mind. "Anything I can do 
for you, corporal?" 

"Yes, sir, a very great favor, sir," answered 
the corporal, with evident hesitation. "Could 
you write out something for me in French 
if I tell you what to write?" 

"I think I could. What is it?" 

"Well, sir, it's this way," hesitated the cor- 
poral. "Fm billeted in a house with the nicest 
little French woman and her two clean, pretty 
little children. Her husband is away at the 
front. Well, sir, the other night some French 
officers came around and they wanted me to go 
and have a good time with them, and I did. I 
got a little off, I suppose ; you know this wine 
— well, anyway, I don't exactly know what 



Americans Sitting in the Shadows 195 

happened, but that nice little woman hasn't been 
the same to me any more. I think she must 
be mad on me. I want to apologize to her, 
tell her Fm sorry, and it won't happen again; 
or if she still feels mad on me, and wants me 
to change my quarters, I'll go way. If I write 
this out, sir, could you put it over into 
French?" 

"I'll do my best, corporal," answered the 
secretary. That night the corporal brought his 
composition, fearfully and wonderfully con- 
structed, to the hut; and it was duly turned 
into the vernacular of the vicinity; and the 
corporal went away proud and happy. The 
secretary never heard directly of the outcome ; 
but two days later there was a ball game; the 
corporal drifted in and bought two cakes of 
chocolate, and a little later the secretary saw 
the corporal sitting at the game with two nice, 
clean little children beside him munching 
chocolate. If that corporal should survive the 
war, and the French husband should not, the 
chances are the United States would be short 
one citizen and France would gain a husband 
for one of her widows. Such is the history 
of armies in foreign lands. One man in this 
division has already married a peasant girl 
here. 

Another lad brought a letter in French to 



196 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

one of the secretaries for translation. The 
secretary told me what it contained. It was an 
answer to a proposal of marriage. The young 
woman said: "Your country and my country 
are at war. You are over here to do your 
part and I am trying to do mine. It is no time 
to talk about marriage. "When the war is 
over, if you are still alive and I am, too, it will 
then be time enough to talk about getting mar- 
ried." 

I call that pretty good horse sense, don't you ? 
You may just count upon it, however, that 
many a man who comes over here will never 
get back, who does not fall in battle. France 
will be shy a good many men and have an over 
supply of women. Inevitable marriages will 
follow. 

There are three topics of conversation at 
officers' mess, three eternal questions. The 
first is women. One officer the other night, 
talking about learning French declared the only 
way to master this tongue is with "one of these 
long haired dictionaries." It goes without say- 
ing — which, by the way, is a French idiomatic 
phrase — it goes without saying that the eternal 
feminine is the first everlasting subject with 
men. 

Then the second question is "shop," military 
discussion. Can we break the Hindenburg 



Americans Sitting in the Shadows 197 

line? Is there to be open fighting? Will the 
war be finished with airplane and machine gun 
cooperating with infantry? "Fm for a corps 
of cavalry !" cried a colonel. 

Says a very bright captain of a machine gun 
company, a West Pointer: "Cavalry is a thing 
of the past. The machine gun, with indirect 
fire, forming the barrage, cooperating, to be 
sure, with heavy guns and infantry, is the way 
through the German line. Of course, the line 
will be broken. It will be costly, but it will be 
broken." 

Then follows the third subject — death! 
They may carry themselves as airily as they 
please, but these officers are never free from 
the thought of the great tansition. They have 
most of them been up the line, or near it, on 
observation; and they know, as I know and 
have good cause to know, what awaits the 
combatant in that line. The enlisted men are 
less disturbed by the presence of the overhang- 
ing shadow. They are younger and not so well 
informed. Besides, responsibility is not rest- 
ing upon them. Theirs but to do and die. 
One lad bought a safety razor of the very best 
kind in the canteen one night and three extra 
packages of blades. I sold it to him. Then I 
said: "You must expect to do a deal of shav- 
ing, my son?" "Well," he replied, "I don't 



198 Facing the Hindenburg Lnne 

suppose ril be able to get one of these things 
again in this country." I could not but wish 
that he may live to use up all those blades. 

It is the officer, however, who, more sensi- 
tively constituted, more cultivated and imagin- 
ative, is able to visualize the impending dan- 
ger; and when you see him sitting unoccupied 
for a few minutes, there comes into his eye 
that far-away, absorbed expression that has 
grown so familiar to me among British and 
French officers and men; and you know, as if 
his forehead were plate glass, the thoughts too 
deep for words that are living and moving in 
his brain. 

The enlisted man frankly declares that the 
war will be over before he ever sees the line. 
The wish is plainly father to the thought. The 
officer labors under no such self -born delusion. 
He knows the chances are all for a long, hard 
struggle yet before us and one in which Amer- 
ica will have to pay her price. If the republic 
does not realize this now she will wake up to 
it as soon as one division is cut to pieces, one 
transport sunk. Then will a flame of fire run 
from New York to San Francisco, from Port- 
land to Galveston and the great pacific, sleep- 
ing people will arouse itself from half -slumber 
and really exert its power. Unless something 
very unf orseen occurs we shall pay back some 



Americans Sitting in the Shadows 199 

of our obligation to the land of Lafayette with 
rich, young American blood. 

But these men, I know, will not falter. As 
a young lad said to me, quietly, "There is not 
a coward among them." They come of fight- 
ing blood. They will go grimly through the 
task given them to perform, the task of ren- 
dering war impossible and unnecessary for 
their sons and their sons' sons, that they, in 
turn, may give their fighting qualities to the 
causes of freedom and democracy, the solution 
of the problems of peace, the betterment of 
humanity, the ideals toward which the world 
is blindly groping upward through mud and 
blood and smoke. 



XIX 

AMERICAN BOYS AND FRENCH 
CHASSEURS 

AS we slept, all innocent of harm, last 
night, German planes sailed over our 
heads and dropped their deadly 
freight on each side of us. Accustomed to 
alarums and excursions, we slept on; but this 
morning we heard of their visit, and went to 
see the destruction. A number of civilians 
were killed and wounded in a certain town 
hard by. Here I saw the first women's tears 
I have seen in France. We saw the cars de- 
railed and smashed in the Germans' attempt 
to blow up the station; but the "gare'' itself 
was uninjured. Near at hand was a hut, 
which had been shattered completely, and 
curious soldiers were walking around it and 
peering in. 

Simultaneously with this expedition the 
morning papers report, there was another over 
the English coast at Dover. While these 
things occur with such frequency we cannot 
claim to be masters in the air. It is perfectly 

200 



American Boys and French Chasseurs 201 

evident, therefore, where America can put in 
her best licks in preparation. While sending 
boats and more boats, let some of them be 
airboats. This war is going to hinge upon 
supremacy in that element. 

I rather suspected that aircraft activity was 
going forward last night, for it was a beauti- 
ful moonlight night. I stood talking with a 
group of Sammies outside the Y. M. hut, after 
a meeting a thousand strong, when they sud- 
denly observed and pointed out to me what 
looked like a new planet in the sky. I soon 
saw it change in color from white to blue and 
then to yellow. The men thought it a signal, 
from the changes in color; but to me it seemed 
an aircraft of some description, so long it re- 
mained afloat and moved about ; some thought 
it a star-shell; but no star-shell hangs so long 
in the sky. Planes come over so often, how- 
ever, that we thought comparatively little of 
the matter. 

I was soon absorbed in the story of how 
our boys had trained their guns on one of 
our own French planes, a short time since, by 
mistake. The men who did the firing, both 
with rifles and machine guns, were the men 
grouped around me, and each contributed his 
part of the tale. Everybody had been nervous 
and on the qui vive at that time, for General 



202 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

Pershing was to come that way in a few 
minutes on a tour of inspection. Indeed, his 
car had aheady been sighted coming down 
that hill over yonder, and the men pointed 
to the spot. Suddenly a plane came shooting 
down out of a cloud and hung quite low above 
them. They could see no allied markings on 
her, and they had several minutes of great 
uneasiness and perplexity. It afterwards de- 
veloped that the French airman was flying 
upside down. I have myself seen them per- 
form that stunt many a time. The purpose 
is to get their guns in such position as to 
shoot upward. A French officer was present 
with our soldiers and after a moment's hesita- 
tion he advised the major in command of our 
troops to open fire. The major gave the order 
and the rifles and machine guns did the rest. 
Almost instantly the aviator righted his 
machine and they saw the allied emblem in 
its proper place. I know that the emblems are 
painted on top as well as underneath; but, for 
some reason, the men failed to discern the 
markings. 

It was impossible, however, to avoid the 
damage to the plane. One wing was broken; 
and the aviator tried to land close at hand 
but, finding no suitable place, managed with 
his crippled craft to effect a landing further 



American Boys and French Chasseurs 203 

on. He himself was uninjured. He after- 
ward signed a written statement, so the men 
told me, that it was his own fault for acting 
in a suspicious manner. 

When the story was all done, the corporal 
who had narrated most of it, took me aside 
to show me photographs, just received, of his 
"ex-wife" in Cripple Creek. He said she had 
divorced him because she did not know where 
he was. It was his own fault. He had no 
reason to complain. It seems he had had 
some qualms of conscience, after reaching La 
Belle France, or some homesick longings, and 
had written her. Then he insisted upon my 
reading her reply, which, it appeared had done 
much for his amour propre. I rather thought, 
myself, from the tone of the letter, that the 
wife would be glad to see him "make a man 
of himself" and come back to her. Here's 
hoping that he does; and from the close re- 
lations he seems to have established with the 
Y. M. leaders, it would not surprise me, if 
he becomes a new man, provided he lives at 
all. 

That I am not exaggerating the possibilities 
of danger to our own men over here was 
amply borne out by the words of an American 
ambulance driver, who had been in the recent 
push at Verdun, Hill 304 and Mort Homme. 



204 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

He said: "The Boche will have it in for the 
first American they can locate. I wouldn't 
like to be in the first line that goes up." Nor 
does this young man believe that the Hun is 
nearly exhausted, or that he has lost his spirit. 
I have seen some 1,200 of the prisoners lately 
taken and they are in very fair physical 
condition, young, but well fed and therefore 
quick to recover from fatigue. Our artil- 
lery is undoubtedly superior to the German, 
but the supremacy of the air hereabouts is 
open to question. As for the vanished morale 
of the Germans, the reports are, like the fam- 
ous ones concerning Mark Twain's premature 
death, somewhat exaggerated. 

For example, this young driver told me of a 
Boche prisoner whom he himself had brought 
into the advanced dressing station wounded; 
how the fellow had been dressed and then wrig- 
gled away in a stolen French coat ; how he had 
crawled to the French trenches hard by, scram- 
bled over them, stole a revolver somewhere 
and shot at an officer and how they caught 
him, with their machine guns, going over No 
Man's Land, and hit him again. This time his 
back was riddled, and after two or three days 
out in a shell hole he was brought back again; 
and they had him in the same dressing station 
once more. The man had been without food 



American Boys and French Chasseurs 205 

for five days straight and part of the time 
for five days before that, but he recovered. 
There was morale left in this one fellow, any- 
how. Do not for a moment believe that the 
war is over. 

One of the most interesting things about the 
battle fronts is the fashion in which batteries 
and aircraft guns, great howitzers and even 
giant naval guns may be concealed. I have 
had the guns to open almost under my feet on 
either side of me, and just behind tne, when 
I was convinced they were within fifty or one 
hundred yards of where I stood, and have been 
unable to locate them. This has happened as 
I walked over a battlefield where not a spear 
of grass, a tree or a bush or stump was left 
standing, nothing but miles of yellow mud. 
How guns and batteries could be so placed 
that one could not see them at such close 
proximity almost passes comprehension. It is 
very clever. On one or two occasions I have 
located them, later on, by the flashes from the 
muzzles and confirmed the belief that they 
were close at hand. Guns are, of course, hid- 
den in every wood, shrub or bush along the 
front. 

After the first time that one of your own 
shells goes over your head the sensation is not 
unpleasant. The first time you jump, duck, 



206 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

feel sheepish and altogether miserable. Of the 
various kinds of music from these overhead 
messengers I prefer the tone and timbre of 
the English five-point-nine. It has a fine voice 
of its own. The French seventy-five emits 
more of a soprano note. For those who care 
only for soprano voices — but this is getting 
to be more metaphorical than the subject will 
stand. 

There is no joy at all in listening to the 
approach of a hostile shell or air craft bomb. 
It is altogether devilish, goose-fleshy, jumpy, 
and makes one feel as one does when a Klaxon 
sounds suddenly in your ear when crossing a 
crowded street. You want to jump and then 
turn around and glare at and "cuss'' somebody. 
Then comes the thump and you breathe again 
and are woefully ashamed of yourself. 

I think I saw some of the finest men in 
the French army to-day — the Algerians and the 
Alpin chasseurs. The Algerians were coming 
back from Verdun, from a long spell of fight- 
ing, to the rest camp. I could not feel, in 
looking at them, that they were vastly in need 
of help, so all alive did they appear. I was 
surprised, too, at the whiteness of skin of 
many of them, but the officer with me promptly 
explained it by the admixture of French 
blood. The men were in a clay-colored khaki 



American Boys and French Chasseurs 207 

with red fezzes. They were allowed off the 
train for a little while in the station ; then the 
bugle sounded and before all of them were 
on again the train moved slowly away on its 
road back from the front. 

The wild-looking fellows came scrambling 
from all directions, to run and clamber on the 
train. Some carried their rifles with bayonets 
still fixed, and as they ran, their faces eager 
and anxious, I got some notion of how they 
would look on charge. I should not care to 
meet them. 

The French chasseur is the flower of the 
French army. These are the boys who, in 
Napoleon's day, used to wear the shining 
breastplates, the tall boots and the horsetail 
plumes. Now they wear the nattiest black or 
blue broadcloth, with the most daredevil cut, 
and the most attractive little visorless caps, 
with big soft crowns, lolling backward over 
one ear. One of these lads, with a quarter of 
an inch of mustache on each side of his nose, 
a raincoat draped carelessly over one shoulder 
and high russet boots to his knees, with the 
croix de guerre and the medaille militaire upon 
his breast, strode up and down the platform 
in a fashion to have stolen every feminine 
heart, if there had only been some feminine 
hearts about. As it was, he was bound for 



208 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

Paris, where it was easy to see he would cut 
a considerably wide swath. I wouldn't blame 
the women for having their heads turned by 
him; for you may be very sure he is all the 
hero he looks. 

These people are all heroes here. I don't 
believe there are any but heroes left in the 
French army. All the rest have been killed 
off long ago ; and no man can go through what 
these men have gone through without having 
been somehow, somewhere heroic. Heroism, 
as has been so often said, is the normal, the 
common, the every day thing over here. 

I met a man this morning who had come 
over from America to fight for his beloved 
France. He had been through nearly three 
years in the trenches. And who do you think 
he was? The chef in a famous Michigan 
resort hotel. And whom do you think he met 
one night in his own regiment in the trenches ? 
The chef of a well-known Chicago hotel, to 
whom he had been an assistant years before. 
Even cooks here must be heroic, for often and 
often they do their cooking under shell fire; /^ 
but the two here referred to were shouldering 
rifles and not ladles. 

Nevertheless, France is war weary. The 
eternal question is on every lip, "Monsieur, 
how long do you think it will last?" The 



American Boys and French Chasseurs 209 

same expression comes from every heart, "O, 
it is terrible, terrible, la guerre T Two or 
three of us are together in my room. The 
big, angular femme-de-chamhre enters in her 
black dress and little white cap. One of the 
men, thinking to be French in his manner, 
pleasantly says: ''Mademoiselle est tres jolie 
dans noir!" "Ah, monsieur," she replies, and 
I would not venture to try and put her French 
into writing, "I wear nothing but black now." 
"And why?" "For my poor brother — killed 
in the war four months ago. Yes ! monsieur, 
and a wife and five little children. It is ter- 
rible — la guerre — terrible! When will it end, 
monsieur?" So it is, on all sides, and all the 
time. And they look to America to put an 
end to it all. We are placed under heavy re- 
sponsibility. 



XX 

AMERICANS MUST LEARN THE 
GAME 

THE French are not, by nature and train- 
ing, an athletic nation. One Sunday 
afternoon an athletic meet was organ- 
ized by the Y. M. at a certain camp in the 
American line, where we have been living for 
a week. The athletic director, wishing to 
promote international relations, went over to 
the French chasseurs, who were billeted in the 
same village, and asked the officers in charge 
if they would not send over men to participate 
in the games. A council of war ensued and 
finally the major in command, sending for a 
sergeant, ordered him to detail a dozen men 
to go over to the contest. Twelve chasseurs 
were duly called out, drawn up at attention 
and gravely marched away to the American 
camp. They went with the same look on their 
faces with which they would go to clean up 
an area, to dig ditches, or perform any other 
fatigue duty. Arrived on the field, they stood 
gravely at attention and awaited directions. 

210 



Americans Must Learn the Gaine 211 

When a certain event was about to be pulled 
off, the sergeant would indicate a man to par- 
ticipate; and the chasseur would step out of 
line and "go to it." 

Of course the American lads ran away, or 
jumped away, or hurled the shot away, from 
their French comrades. At last, however, the 
poilus caught the infectious merriment and 
before the afternoon was over they were 
laughing, shouting and sharing in the fun in 
a fashion to do your heart good. 

Last event of all was a tug of war. The 
whole round dozen of Frenchmen, or the whole 
dozen of round Frenchmen, were ranged in 
line against a dozen lanky Sammies. The 
bit of white cloth fastened to the rope that 
ran along between the two groups, represent- 
ing two nations, was exactly over a chalk line 
boundary between the United States and La 
Belle France. A pistol shot, in the language 
of the detective stories, rang out upon the 
still Sabbath air. Then the Americans or- 
ganized spontaneously a series of undulating 
jerks like those a terrier perpetrates, when he 
has his teeth firmly in a bit of cord or cloth 
that his youthful master holds in hand; and 
French chasseurs advanced with a rapidity 
that even Hill 304 had never witnessed. It 
was a case in which the winning army went 



212 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

backwards, and the losing forwards. It was a 
battle, too, punctuated by shouts and laughter, 
in place of curses and bursting shells. 

It was everybody's regret that Jack was 
unable to be present and show his paces. The 
race in which he has stood ready to run any- 
body in the British army, and now the Ameri- 
can or French armies, and for which he pur- 
chased a track suit and running shoes, and 
devised an emblem of the Chicago Athletic 
Club, has never yet been run. Either the 
soldiers have always been too busy, or we our- 
selves have been sent away to sing and talk 
for other groups, so that the event could not 
be staged. There is no loafing on the job on 
this side of the water. Most men, even past 
military age, in England and France, are too 
much occupied with war work, even to play 
golf, croquet, tennis or so much as cards. The 
games are played only by soldiers in rare 
moments of relaxation. 

If the French do not excel in athletics, they 
nevertheless admire any who do. One day 
a certain captain of ours was arranging 
quarters for our men in a certain village. He 
was the first American soldier ever seen there ; 
and a crowd followed him about. He was 
shown into a stable with a hay loft. The 
steps up to the mow were dilapidated and some 



Americans Must Learn the Game 213 

were missing. There were certain poles pro- 
jecting from the walls, however, and the slim 
young fellow swung himself up hand over 
hand, from one to another. The peasants 
broke out into cheering at the feat. 

First place of all for a billeting party to 
be taken is the schoolhouse, as there is always 
space for from thirty to fifty men here. 
When our captain entered the village school 
the children sprang up, began cheering for 
America, and mounted seats and desks in their 
enthusiasm for their new ally. 

This same captain was driving with a 
French general officer along a country road, 
when a little boy lying by the roadside threw 
a handful of gravel at the car. The missiles 
took good effect ; and the general was furious. 
He stopped his car, although it took nearly 
half a kilometer to do it, went back, and call- 
ing the lad's mother, who was now on the 
scene, lectured her and the boy roundly, telling 
her that this young officer with him repre- 
sented the Great American Republic, and the 
newest ally; and discourtesy had been offered 
not merely to the men, but to Le Grand Na- 
tion. He would not leave until the first lesson 
in international amenity had been administered 
warmly to the base of the young scion of 
France; a lesson that doubtless he will never 



214 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

forget, but hand on to future generations with 
keen remembrance and appreciation, beside the 
cotter's fire of winter nights in the middle 
years of the Twentieth Century. 

The French soldiers take kindly to asso- 
ciation football and every evening after their 
day's work you may see them, red-faced and 
perspiring, mingle with our own lads on the 
field kicking and chasing the pigskin oval. 
They become quite expert, too, with practice, 
though I do not believe they have quite the 
athletic instinct of the immediate sons of 
pioneers. In bombing and trench crawling 
and such exercises, our men learn with singu- 
lar rapidity to outdo their instructors. At 
first the French soldiery were mingled with 
our men, company for company, and man for 
man. The French would go through a certain 
performance, then our men would follow; and 
each American would possess a French, critic, 
guide, philosopher and friend. In two or 
three days it became evident that so many 
instructors were not needed; and now there 
are only a few French officers left with each 
unit. 

Bomb throwing comes handy to old base- 
ball players. It is done with a different mo- 
tion than ball throwing, to be sure ; it is indeed 
a stiff-armed side stroke like the English 



Americans Must Learn the Game 215 

cricket bowling. Nevertheless our men are 
quick and adaptable and soon master it. This 
peculiar stroke is necessary to avoid striking 
the back of the narrow trench. As the prac- 
tice goes on with real bombs it is not alto- 
gether harmless child's play. One day an 
American boy struck the parados, or rear of 
the trench, in his back swing and as a result 
is now on his way to America minus a 
hand. Also a Frenchman on our practice 
grounds dropped one on the floor of the 
trench, and instead of picking it up quickly 
and tossing it before its five seconds' fuse had 
time to spark, he lost his head and put his 
foot on it. He was killed. 

The men are stripped to the waist and 
taught to crawl on hands and knees, and to 
wriggle along on their stomachs on the surface 
or in shallow trenches. They also practice 
carrying each other on their backs while in 
this cramped position; sometimes two will 
carry a very heavy man between them. At 
all of this kind of business our men are very 
apt and soon surpass their French instructors. 

Do not believe, however, that the little 
American force has grasped, as yet, these new 
methods of warfare, or is anything like pre- 
pared to take its share. The grim general in 
charge is determined they shall not go into 



216 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

the mill and shoulder their load until they 
are prepared in all points ; first line, supporting 
line, third line, supply communications stretch- 
ing clear back to America unbroken, artillery 
of our own and not somebody else's, and air 
fleets manned by Americans and under Ameri- 
can command. This is not a matter of na- 
tional egotism, but a matter of safety for the 
lives of men. An immense amount is necessary 
for us both to do and to learn before that 
time comes. This warfare is of a type new 
to us, and we must study it from the ground 
up. Furthermore, just as it takes fifteen men 
to care for and to fly one airplane, so it takes 
a vast number of people to man a fighting 
line, more for us than for anybody else, be- 
cause our communications are so much longer. 
Every individual in our nation will be neces- 
sary before we get through. 

I am informed upon the best authority that 
we have two regiments now at one of the 
allied fronts and that they are so ill-equipped 
as to be compelled to borrow shoes, socks, 
clothing and such necessary supplies from their 
neighbors. If that is the case in the height 
of summer, what is to be expected when the 
winter comes on, in the way of trench feet, 
pneumonia and the like? Unless we can or- 
ganize a supply system that will adequately 



Americans Must Learn the Game 217 

clothe and furnish our men, we shall pay the 
price not merely in sickness, but in death. 
Our men may be athletic and adaptable, but 
they are not immortal. 

A heavy per cent of these boys are raw 
recruits, outside of the marines. Their 
marching in the streets of London and Paris, 
while the populace huzzaed and welcomed 
them with kindly enthusiasm, was not such 
as to fill American military men with over- 
weening pride. I have talked with their 
leaders and I know how they felt. The 
American press had heralded these men as 
regulars, as fine a fighting force as there was 
in the world. Instead came recent volunteers 
mixed with regulars to challenge comparison 
with the finest troops this world ever saw. We, 
who were there, could not but think of that 
small army of British regulars a little over 
sixty thousand strong, which began the war 
in that wonderful retreat from Belgium, and 
left all but about eight thousand scattered 
along the way. 

We are not "stuck up" over our own first 
showing. We have got to retrieve that loss of 
prestige, not by more boasting about 100,000 
airplanes that we say we are going to build 
and cannot build, nor even fifty thousand, nor 
twenty-five thousand; but by patient enlisting, 



218 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

equipping and drilling of an army, while we 
keep our mouths grimly shut and do, instead 
of talk. 

Meantime, there come to us stories over 
here of rich men in America exempted be- 
cause they have married a wife and needs 
must support her, of famous golf players, who 
think they can better serve their country, 
civilization and God by playing gallery play 
for the beflanneled men and beribonned women 
who are posing as devoted Red Crossers. 
Talk about "muddied oafs at the goal !" Only 
two men out of ten who are called to the 
colors in New York, we hear, sign up and 
take the oath ! Thank God, the Middle West, 
the much doubted Middle West, is doing far 
better than that! I have read somewhere in 
history of a man "who married a wife and 
therefore could not come/' For him the heads 
of no gates will be lifted up! 

Pardon for breaking into exhortation and 
a measure of denunciation. If all America 
could see that little group of children at a 
French port it would have its effect. Our 
boys had just left the transports. They were 
in the hastily improvised Y. M. C. A. hut. 
They had a wheezy little melodeon and were 
squeezing out the Marseillaise — most glorious 
of songs. Some little school children wandered 



Americans Must Learn the Game 219 

in, fingers in mouths. The boys put them up 
on a table and commanded them to sing. The 
little people, woefully embarrassed, tried to 
comply; but fingers and thumbs blocked the 
song. By and by they caught the infection 
from the little melodeon, the song began tc 
come, to gather headway. Then the screechy 
little organ played out; but that made no 
difference now, the children's heads were up, 
their mouths open, and their voices rang clear 
and strong as the immortal Marseillaise held 
the Americans hushed in its grasp. 

Another time I heard it sung. The singer 
was a dashing young chasseur in an American 
hut. The piano was going and hundreds of 
Sammies were milling about. Soon the player 
drifted into the French national song. Im- 
mediately the young "blue devil" sprang to 
attention; his hand went to his forehead in 
salute, and he stood like a statue as long as 
the music lasted. It would be well for us to 
learn this national reverence for our national 
songs. Then he leaped upon a table, cap in 
hand, and began to sing; the lad at the piano 
came on with the accompaniment ; I never saw 
a more graceful, handsome, inspiring figure 
than this young dare-devil who had been 
through many a battle and carried the wound 
stripe on his arm. May he live to fight for 



220 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

France until this war is done, his country free 
from the invader and the world made a safe 
place for democracy! 

The situation is not all depressing for 
America, her prestige, her influence and her 
future effect. Marshals of France could not 
be met with greater respect and affection than 
our ambulance drivers during a big push, 
where they have taken the worst of shell fire 
with the utmost coolness. These boys are 
somewhat disgruntled at the taking over of 
their corps by the government. It was a nec- 
essary measure, no doubt; but they feel that 
they should be entitled to something better 
than a private's rank. They are, many of 
them, college lads, some millionaires, some of 
them very strong, mature and unusual men. 
Some are going into aviation, some into artil- 
lery schools and some into other units. I met 
one who had come over on the ship with us, 
a man of thirty, who formerly lived in Kansas 
City. He told me he had decided for the 
Foreign Legion. 

I know a surgeon — he also came over on 
our ship — who is now in charge of the surgical 
ward of a big French hospital up near the 
front. I met him one day in Paris, and we sat 
for an hour in the Cafe de la Paix and talked 
it all over. America was about to expend a 



Americans Must Learn the Game 221 

quarter of a million dollars at that hospital; 
but transportation was the problem. The 
money could not go in there, unless this prob- 
lem could be solved. The surgeon said nothing 
about the intentions of his government, but 
set about solving the problem. He saw a 
river close by. He conceived the plan of 
finding a steamer and somebody to run it. 
He came to Paris, made the search, found the 
boat and an old skipper and was going back 
rejoicing on the morrow. The money will 
go in. 

I fear this chapter will sound to many dis- 
couraging. I do not wish it to. If it simply 
faces us with the cold facts, and leads us to 
arise and arouse, there is no people on the 
face of earth whose inventiveness and bound- 
less energy can do more and will do more. 
After all, our men are very square bodied, 
big boned, trimly clad fellows. There are no 
bulging pockets in the skirts of their tunics, 
as there are in so many others over here. 
Their jacket collars may not be comfortable, 
tight up about their necks; but they give a 
certain neatness and soldierly air. As raw 
material one may admire them most heartily 
and be justly proud of them; but one has to 
remember, and nobody knows it better than 
their general, that they are still raw material 



222 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

with their job to learn. He will not be hur- 
ried, either, into throwing their lives away 
before they have learned. 

None of our enlisted men have thus far 
been allowed leave to go to Paris. They are 
very anxious for such opportunity. I was 
able to cheer them one day with the informa- 
tion that leave would be granted them as soon 
as the Y. M. C. A. was ready to open its 
Paris hotels. Such hotels have been secured 
and are in process of renovation. Another 
interesting order is one issued by General 
Pershing. It is especially so, in view of the 
fact that some of the army chaplains have 
been inclined to fight the Y. M. The order 
reads that the Red Cross is to have charge 
of all relief measures, the Y. M. C. A. of all 
social and religious matters and chaplains will 
render all assistance in their power. 



XXI 
THE SPECTACULAR ITALIAN FRONT* 

ONE of the most important battle fronts 
in Europe is the Italian. It has, 
however, been regarded, for the most 
part, with a lagging interest until, last August, 
the tremendously successful offensive on 
Monte San Gabriele and the Carso Plateau 
was carried out. Then the world sat up and 
took notice. 

Italy had been quietly working along with 
incredible industry against her age-long foe, 
Austria, and had broken suddenly loose with 
a big push that netted her chunks of important 
territory and a full army corps of prisoners. 
People began at once to say: 

"Shouldn't be surprised if, after all, here is 
a vital point to thrust at the central confed- 
eracy. I'd like to see this Italian front." 

I freely confess that this was my own atti- 
tude of mind. So I immediately applied for 

*The writer sees no reason to alter these chap- 
ters concerning the Italian front in spite of recent 
events. There can be no doubt that a great opportunity 
has here been lost through lack of team play on the 
part of the Allies. 

223 



224 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

permission to visit the battle lines about 
Trieste. 

Such permission was not difficult to obtain; 
for Italy is justly proud of her achievements 
and is rightly anxious that the world should 
know of them. So long has she prepared and 
labored in silence that, now she has begun to 
reap the fruits of her labors, she feels she 
ought to get the due credit for them. She is 
altogether right. 

Everybody that knows Italy loves Italy; 
and she has had the sympathy of the culti- 
vated world since the days of Metternich. 
Her heroes and patriots, her Garibaldis and her 
Cavours, have commanded the heart beats of 
all westerners outside of the Teutonic tribes 
for more than a century. Our Byrons, and 
Brownings, and Shelleys have shared the sor- 
rows of Italy; and all who have the faintest 
tinge of their spirit are rejoicing to-day in 
Italian successes against her particular type 
of Huns. 

Italy stands to come out of this war far 
greater than she went in. She resisted the 
Teuton attempts at blackmail, in the beginning 
of the conflict. She never once hesitated. 
Those who think she did, do not know her 
spirit. 

Fancy Italians fighting side by side with 



The Spectacular Italian Front 225 

Austrians! It is enough simply to mention 
the two names in the same breath to know 
at once where they would align themselves. 
I remember thinking, five or six years ago, 
that Italy was making an effort, second-class 
power that she was, to pose as a first-class 
military nation, much to the taxation and 
suffering of her poverty stricken common 
people. 

Time has but proven that I was wrong and 
she was right. Somebody in Italy was long 
headed enough to see what was coming, and 
to prepare for it. Now she will emerge, as 
she deserves to do, with her frontiers secured 
forever, let us hope, against the Vandal, with 
a people richer and stronger, more independent 
and happier, than they have been for more 
than a century. 

We in America have been accustomed to 
think of Italians in terms of the Sicilian 
banana venders and organ grinders. If, by 
chance, we have "toured" the sunny land we 
may think a bit in terms of picture galleries 
and old crumbling palaces, painted walls and 
campaniles. 

It is only when we have come into personal 
contact with her soldiers, officers, inventors, 
writers, administrators, that we begin really 
to know her. It is easy to forget that this is 



226 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

the land which produced such brains and 
builders as Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Giotto, 
Lorenzo the Magnificent, Bellini, Savonarola 
and a host of others. 

The same kind of brains is there to-day, and 
is being turned toward construction of a dif- 
fent kind — the construction of a state. And, 
believe me, the foundations are being laid as 
firmly as the foundation of St. Peter's. 

To say that one was astonished at the ad- 
ministrative and inventive genius of Italy in 
these hours of struggle is only to confess one's 
own ignorance or thoughtlessness. One ought 
to have known beforehand what to expect. 
Only, it is possible for others of us, besides 
the Germans, to make the mistake of believing 
that our neighbors are decadent or lacking 
in virility. 

Because the Italian is, like his landscape, 
gentle, sunny, kindly, musical, easy going, is 
no indication that he cannot set great wheels 
to whirling when the need comes. You have 
but to see the swarming millions of soldiers 
back of her front and watch the smooth work- 
ing of her machinery of supply and the in- 
calculable industry of her road building, to 
awake to the fact that here is a noble and 
puissant people, rousing itself like a strong 
man. 



The Spectacular Italian Front 227 

Four million of men under arms! Almost 
as many as England and France hold on the 
western front. And not a man of them idle. 
The common soldiers in other armies may- 
suffer from ennui — never the Italian! 

The character of her leaders, too, deserves 
some thought. The courtliest and the kind- 
liest officers in Europe, they are, at the same 
time, among the most efficient. General 
Cardona more nearly applies the methods of 
Napoleon to this modern war than any other 
general. 

It is worth remembering, too, that he is 
the only chieftain in any army who began the 
war in supreme command and has retained it 
till now, and is likely to retain it to the end. 

Then there is the king. Victor Immanuel 
challenges comparison with Albert of the 
Belgians. I saw him, close up to the lines, 
driving back to headquarters, white as a 
miller, from the dust. 

**What do you think of your king?" I asked 
one and another. 

"Our king is one of the best," they replied, 
modestly. "He is like a president — he knows 
how far he can go, and no further. As it is, 
he goes into the front trenches, is all the time 
at the front. Rome never sees him. 

"He talks with the common soldiers. He 



228 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

moves among them and asks, *How goes it? 
How fare you?' We are well content with 
our king." 

The king's cousin, the Duke of Aosta, is in 
command of one of the armies under Cardona. 
We visited that army; and we visited the 
headquarters of a string of batteries, one of 
which the duke's son commands. We had 
tea with the other officers, but the young 
nobleman was not present. 

"He is with his battery," smiled the brigadier 
in command. 

We could see that he was well pleased with 
his youthful captain, of royal blood; and we 
turned an ear of sharpened attention to the 
brisk cracking of the seventy-fives out to the 
left 

The people, too, seem united as nearly as 
any nation ever was that went to war, in sup- 
port of their leaders. Oh, there are some 
dissatisfied Socialists, some confirmed pacifists, 
some corrupted of German gold, as in all the 
nations in this war, not forgetting our own; 
but the observer sees little sign in Italy to-day 
of aught but a determined, industrious and 
cheerful prosecution of daily life and of the 
war. 

There is little or no evidence of the battle 
fatigue of France. There are not so many 



The Spectacular Italian Front 2^9 

maimed and stranded, in sight as there are 
in England. Everybody has more work than 
in normal times, more money and apparently 
more food. 

There is but one necessity of life that seems 
seriously short, and that is fuel. Coal costs 
more per pound than bread. 

"What is bread per kilo ?" I asked a govern- 
ment official. 

"It is selling at sixty," he replied. 

"And coal?" 

"Oh !" he cried, throwing up his hands ; for 
every Italian is a born orator, or actor, or 
comedian ; they are all Salvinis. "Coal is any- 
thing! It is eighty, ninety, a hundred, a 
hundred and twenty ! I had a friend who, last 
week, heard of a quantity of coal and went 
to buy it. A hundred and twenty was the 
price demanded. After long bargaining he got 
it at a hundred." 

Almost twice the price of bread. Fancy 
running locomotives and factory engines with 
bread — no, not bread, but cake ! Where would 
industrial Italy be without her Alpine water 
power ? I walked through a humming factory 
in Milan, and suddenly it occurred to me to 
ask where they got their fuel to drive all these 
wheels and shaftings. 



230 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

"Oh, it's electric, of course; water power!" 
was the answer. 

"Of course," thought I. "If they were de- 
pendent upon coal all these wheels would 
stop." 

Furthermore, Italy must import not only 
her fuel, but her raw materials. She cannot 
furnish us with all the airplanes we would like 
to buy from her unless we send her the lumber* 
and the steel to make them with. That is 
what is the matter with her depreciated lire 
to-day. 

She imports all the time, and cannot suffi- 
ciently export. This state of affairs will right 
itself after a while, let us hope. Just as the 
presence of the Americans in France has 
actually sent up the price of real estate in 
Paris because we have needed so many hotels 
and other buildings and grounds for our uses ; 
just as American money pouring into French 
small trades has brought a renewed prosperity 
to France; so, in time, will the American de- 
mand for supplies aid Italy to rehabilitate her 
coinage. 

There is still another reason why one cannot 
wisely fail to visit the Italian front, and that 
is because it is the most dramatic, the most 
spectacular battle line in Europe. When you 



The Spectacular Italian Front 231 

have seen the Flanders front you have seen 
it all, you might say, west of Switzerland. 

The desolated villages are all alike. The 
smoking trenches, the rooting, grunting, hog- 
gish shells, the mud, the dugouts, the camou- 
flage, the crowded roads — it is all alike. True, 
about Verdun and Alsace there is some broken 
variation of topography; and at various other 
memorable portions of the line there are out- 
standing bits, but in the main, when you have 
seen a part you find it but a sample of the 
whole. 

In Italy it is not so. The Alps lift the 
whole line up and hang it in festoons over 
their shoulders. You can look down upon the 
enemy's guns, watch their fire, trace their 
projectiles, hear and see them fall and explode. 
You can stand behind your own guns and 
see the effect of your fire on a spot four 
miles away which, through the clear air, seems 
only half a mile. 

You can see a whole battlefield tilted up 
on edge, hung like a picture on the wall. You 
can walk from peak to peak, or ride, and ex- 
amine the field from different angles. You 
can look down beneath at the gorges where 
wind the silver mountain rivers, with their 
pontoons yet bloody from recent daring con- 
quests. You can look face to face upon 



232 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

mountain precipices, up which Alpini have 
scaled like mountain goats, rifles strapped on 
shoulders and knives in teeth, in the fashion 
of the old days of chivalry. 

Here, too, you can estimate the strength of 
a position, forty or fifty miles long, from a 
single vantage point. You can look at the 
enemy's line and his reserve country and sup- 
plies, and his slippery foothold; then you can 
see your own, and look behind you at the 
crawling millions shoving forward, pushing, 
edging, inching toward a goal. 

One is overpowered by the thought that 
here, on the Italian front, is, after all, the 
weak spot in the central empires' defenses. 
Here concentration of allied artillery and air- 
planes would turn the trick, smash through, 
break quickly like a mountain torrent out of 
the mountains, upon the plateaus, run away to 
Vienna and cut the central confederacy in 
two. This may be an amateur's estimate, but 
it is backed up by much good expert opinion. 

The Italians have men enough; they need 
only guns and munitions. There must be 
reasons, in the jealous councils of the powers, 
otherwise this wedge would surely have been 
driven. Maybe America can lend a hand, if 
not in driving it, at least in promoting a more 
unified spirit among the Allies. 



XXII 
THE ITALIAN COMMANDO SUPREMO 

THE approach to the Commando Supremo, 
as the Italians call the headquarters of 
their army in the field, is over the 
plains of Northern Italy and around the foot of 
the Alps, past a blue lake here and there — 
all country that Browning has painted for us, 
even to its grains of dust. 

You go by rail and have the feeling that 
the Italian government ought not to be wasting 
coal on you. The carriages are jammed. 
Soldiers and officers everywhere, thickening in 
numbers as you approach the front. Civilians 
squeeze in and hold standing room by suf- 
ferance. If you desire a wagon lit, or sleeping 
car, you must take it a week ahead. As to 
meals, they come according to the old sport- 
ing rules of catch-as-catch-can. On the whole, 
however, it is wonderful that the railways get 
their trains through at all, crowded as are the 
lines with supplies, hospital trains, troop trains, 
and burning, as they do, fuel that is as precious 
as so much gold. 

Be patient, then, if you are shunted off into 

233 



234 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

towns that you never expected to see. And if 
you are laid out on sidings while a train bear- 
ing the general staff or hurried re-enforcements 
goes tearing by, or if you lie in a station 
for an hour while a hospital train comes in 
and all the long lines of sufferers in the berths, 
whose marble white or cadaverous clayey 
faces you can see as you walk the platform — 
their bloody bandages, their upheld stumps of 
arms and legs — are served with tea or wine, 
be patient and cheerful, for these people, in 
their life and death struggle, are so. 

At last you are winding on again, ten hours 
late it may be, but winding on through a 
country that reminds you a bit of the best 
parts of Mexico, with its life in the sun and 
the dust, its white walls, its golden fields. 
Here and there you see 

"That dry green old aqueduct 
Where Charles and I, when boys, have plucked 
The fireflies from the roof above, 
Bright, creeping through the moss they love." 

Now and then you see a band of peasants, 
"dear noisy crew,'* going to work among the 
maize. Now and again you see a young 
woman standing in 

"Our Italy's own attitude. 
In which she walked thus far and stood, 
Planting each naked foot so firm, 
To crush the snake and spare the worm." 



The Italian Commando Supremo 235 

Then there are the children, shoals of them. 
Are there any such children as the Italians 
have? Big dark eyes; round, rosy faces; 
Raphaels' and Murillos' cherubs and fruit boys. 
I am sure such beautiful children, in such pro- 
fusion, flourish nowhere else on earth. An 
officer said to me: "Our army came. Now 
are there plenty of children." 

I was surprised at the rice fields. Somehow 
I had never gotten it through my head that 
Italy grew rice in quantities. But there were 
the canals and irrigation ditches cutting the 
fields; and there was the crop, gold ripe, and 
being cut, acres and acres, miles and miles of 
it, and there were the threshing floors — great 
circular, hard-beaten spaces on the bare earth, 
with the grain in piles around the edges, and 
the flails beating, the dust rising in the middle. 
Surely Italy cannot be hard put to it for food 
this coming winter. She may shiver, but she 
cannot starve. 

Furthermore, there were the mulberry trees, 
great orchards of them, Edens for the silk- 
worm, who is pampered and nurtured, cared 
for as sedulously as if he were of royal blood; 
and royal is his product of Italian silk. But 
somehow Italy must turn that silk into wool 
for the winter months. We must help her 
solve the problem of transportation and lighten 



236 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

for her, if we can, the burden of the coming 
cold. 

All along the way are grapes, pears, peaches, 
plums, flowers. It is good to be in Italy in 
late summer, if only for the delicious fruits 
and the glorious flowers. One may live on 
fruits -at this time of year, a most wholesome 
living. What a happy country if it were at 
peace! What a sturdy country while at war! 
I was not cut to the heart, as in France. 
People seemed cheerful, seemed to walk with 
a springy step, seemed confident of the out- 
come, seemed to have no doubts or disunion 
among them. Italian soldiers seemed to go to 
the front with a song in their hearts, if not 
on their lips; and Italian women seemed to 
remain behind and sing. 

You think of Italy, anyway, as a singing 
land; and you are not wrong. I heard voices 
out of the troop trains which could have done 
justice to Mario's song "that could soothe, 
with a tenor note, the souls in purgatory." I 
heard a woman's voice, somewhere in the 
headquarters town, one morning, echoing 
through the courts and over the housetops, 
that was worthy to ring out in La Scala, at 
Milan. I heard duos and trios in the camps 
that could have rendered the daintiest bits of 
Verdi and that brought back memories of 



The Italian Commando Supremo 237 

years ago when street boys in a town of South 
Italy stood under a window at night and 
soothed and serenaded a fevered patient. 
Sing? Of course Italy can sing. You can't 
keep her from singing. She is the home of 
the silk and velvet tone; and, like the fabled 
nightingale, she sings all the more sweetly, if 
more poignantly, for the needle in her eye. 

That town of the Commando Supremo, 
Udine, is a dream in the moonlight. The main 
"place," or square, or as Mexico would say, the 
plaza, is broken in skyline with Venetian shad- 
ow almost Oriental in effect. Arch and colon- 
nade border it, and great stone fountains and 
columns break it. There is no light but the 
moon, for bombing airplanes visit it now and 
again. Every window is heavily blinded; and 
thick wool or leather curtains hang over shop 
and cafe doors. The place swarms with life, 
and you are lucky to have the services of 
obliging Italian officers to find you accom- 
modations. Nevertheless, you cannot help 
thinking it would be pleasant to spend the 
night in the open, under the colonnades. 

It is time now, however, to get to the front. 
You get there fast enough when you start, I 
warrant you. I thought the French and 
British soldiers bold practitioners with the 
motor car; but they are not one, two, three 



238 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

with the Italians. Talk about Jehus! But, 
then, they have the roads, and they have the 
engines, and they have had the experience to 
train up a race of daring but skillful chauffeurs. 
At first my hair stood on end; then I grew 
accustomed to the pace. Dust glasses were 
essential. We were the head of a comet, whose 
body and tail were one long kilometer of 
white dust; and we were charging at other 
comets, passing them and merging into their 
tenuous tails. Our Klaxon was going all the 
time, and so were other Klaxons; nor were 
they like any others you have ever heard out- 
side of Italy. They were like Brobdignagian 
canary birds, with a shrill and insistent chirp 
that split your ears as well the wind. They 
were not less impudent than the dog bark of 
American Klaxons, but far more penetrating 
and weird. 

We swept past the old Austrian frontier, 
past the building that used to be the custom 
house, and into the conquered and occupied 
ground. It was a delightful sensation to be, 
for once, on the other fellow's soil. All other 
battlefields and front lines arc on the lands 
of our Allies. Now to be rolling forward 
through towns and villages — some three hun- 
dred of them there are in all, with a total 
population of several hundred thousand — 



The Italian Commando Supremo 239 

that used to belong to the enemy, was most 
refreshing indeed. We began to understand 
the good cheer and the confidence of the 
Italians. 

"Yonder is our rightful frontier," cried the 
captain with us, pointing away to a range of 
mountains to the north and east. It was plain 
as a pikestaff, too, that he was right. No 
nation could be content with those mountains 
in the hands of a bullying, hereditary enemy, 
forever frowning down upon defenseless 
plains. 

"Do they hold them now?" we asked. 

"Only in part," he answered. "We are win- 
ning them. They are half ours already." 

We came to a pause at a divisional post, 
and strolled through an ex-Austrian town. In 
the square was a bronze statue of Maximillian, 
with a wonderful inscription. Hang that 
British sergeant — that Durham coal miner — 
who stole my notes. From memory, the in- 
scription runs: 

"In honor of Maximillian and the eternal 
union of these counties of Gorizia and — > 
something else — to the House of Hapsburg." 

That eternal union is like the eternal union 
of Maximillian and Mexico. Eternal union! 
Methinks he doth protest too much, said 
Shakespeare. The inscription was all plastered 



240 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

over with General Cadorna's printed notices 
to the people, but a friend supplied it to me. 

The names of streets in all these towns and 
villages were Italian. The old Austrian names 
had been torn down, and new and m.ore ap- 
propriate ones supplied. Much of the damage 
done by bombardment had been repaired; and 
these indefatigable swarms of Italian ants 
were hard at it, in many places, erecting clean, 
white new buildings. Still it was odd to see 
Austrian names and advertisements over the 
doors of many shops which were open and 
doing business. 

Soon we began to climb up, up, round and 
round, doubling on our track, but always up. 
The roads were now under camouflage and 
the batteries barking around us, under us, 
above us. Sausage balloons came into view, 
outlining the battle fronts and hanging where 
we had never seen them before, over moun- 
tain tops. Shells began arriving from the 
Austrians; and Italian shells began departing 
in exchange. We were again in the thick of 
it. But no steel helmets were served out to 
us and no gas masks, as on other fronts. The 
Alpini go gaily into battle in their woollen 
caps; and the batteries are served by Italian 
soldiery, at least half of whom were without 



The Italian Commando Supremo 241 

the "tin hats" that one expects to see in the 
lines. 

All kinds of transport were around us, 
cameons, carts with horses and mules, pack 
asses and even yokes of oxen. They say that 
one indication to the Austrian that Italy 
meant war was the massing of oxen on the 
Gorizia frontier. It seems odd to see great 
sleepy white beasts like these in the panoply 
of modern machine made war. Repeatedly 
the traffic got jammed. We would swing 
round a sharp curve with a precipice going 
down hundreds of feet on the left and sheer 
rock going up hundreds of feet on the right 
and butt into a puffing, struggling mass of 
vehicles and men trying to go both ways. We 
would, with the uncanny skill of our driver, 
wind in among them and worm through. 

At times we would halt the cameons to let 
as by; and then I felt guilty, as doubtless did 
the others, that we should stop, for a single 
instant, the progress of this war to let by 
a bunch of civilian drones. Yet, after all, the 
Commando Supremo must have felt that it 
was worth while ; that we, in a helpless, feeble 
way, with mere words, might do something 
to help the good cause along, else they would 
not have been at such pains to make a path 
for us. 



242 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

For the most part it was marvelous how 
well organized and expedited was all this 
traffic. The most crowded front in Europe! 
Four millions of fighting men on a line not 
over a hundred miles ! Yet we saw no cameons 
stalled by the roadside. Yes, we saw two. One 
of them had slipped off the road above and 
had fallen in a sitting posture upon the other 
on the curve of the road beneath. Of course, 
the underneath one looked embarrassed, 
crushed as it were; but busy little men were 
at work engineering it out, and the eternal 
stream of the traffic hugged the hillside and 
crept around. When, in the early days of 
the war, long lines of motor trucks were 
speeding with munitions toward the front, no 
time was wasted upon any one cameon that 
got out of commission. They simply shoved 
it into the ditch and sped along, until leisure 
could be found to give it first aid. So was it 
in the summer's offensive. They are good or- 
ganizers, these Italians. 

Monte Sabbatino, on the left and Monte 
Podgora on the right as you approach Gorizia, 
are like two pillars of Hercules that frame 
the fighting ground leading up to the Carso. 
Between them the eye can sweep over the 
valley of the Izonzo with the city of Gorizia 
on the banks of the blue river, over Monte 



The Italian Commando Supremo 243 

Santo, like a Franciscan in a brown cassock 
and hood, which the Italians wrested from its 
defenders, over San Marco and San Gabriele, 
where the trenches of both sides wind, like 
yellow snakes and seem almost to intercoil, so 
close are they, and on to the Hermada, the 
great fortified mountain ridge on which the 
Italians have their eyes, as the last bar to the 
road to Trieste. 

Can they take it? Of course, they can take 
it, if we lend them a hand; take it they will, 
and with it Trieste, the beautiful prosperous, 
more than half Italian city, where Cunarders 
used to sail for America, and where in a cer- 
tain tower, Richard of the Lion Heart was 
once a prisoner, lost to the world, until his 
squire, disguised as a troubadour, went through 
Europe singing an old song his master knew, 
until the song was answered, the king found 
and brought to his own again. So also will 
Italy sing, and, pounding on the gates of 
Trieste, half-troubadour, half-soldier, bring 
back to her bosom what belongs to her, many 
a son and many a daughter who have long 
endured the bitter Austrian rule. 



XXIII 
THE INDEFATIGABLE ITALIAN 

THE most remarkable achievement of the 
Italian army is not the driving back 
of the Austrians from mountain top to 
mountain top, from gorge to gorge, off the 
summits of sheer cHffs, across foaming rivers 
and rocky plateaus — though all that is remark- 
able enough in all conscience. The most daring 
and indefatigable thing they have done is the 
building of good wide roads over all this 
impassable terrain. Talk about hairpin curves, 
they are hair raising and hair curling, those 
curves. My ears bubbled constantly with the 
increasing altitude, and my flesh crept as the 
skillful drivers rimmed the cliffs with our 
tires; and we could look down fifty feet of 
rock to where we had been a minute before, 
and up fifty more to where we would be in 
another minute. 

These roads are all new; for the Austrians 
had not troubled to build them, having never 
dreamed that the Italians would attempt the 
impossible, and push them off these heights. 
Originally, there was one rough highway, for 
example, leading down to the Biansizza 

244 



The Indefatigable Italian 245 

Plateau, and a straggling goat path or two. 
In eleven days, the swarming Italians con- 
structed a beautiful wide highway, winding 
down in the fantastic curves of a cotton 
string dropped and festooned at random, 
apparently, over the heads and shoulders of 
the Alps. If Napoleon can wake up in para- 
dise — or wherever he is — and look upon these 
achievements, he must feel like the man from 
Johnstown comparing notes with Noah. If 
you could see these roads, you would at once 
understand the remark made in a former 
chapter, that the ItaHan soldier is never idle. 
When not in the trenches, he rests by building 
roads; when he has no other definite and im- 
mediate task, he builds roads; when con- 
valescent, he builds roads ; and when he wakes 
up at night and can't go back to sleep, he just 
steps out and builds roads. 

Think, too, of the heritage left to this coun- 
try, when the war is done — a whole circulating 
system, sending life blood and development 
into mountain fastnesses that have been locked 
up since the glacial period from all but the 
tread of goatherds and a few daring vine 
dressers. Do not imagine, either, that the 
country is barren, desert, lifeless. The most 
beautiful silva clothes the hills. I noted 
beeches, elms, oaks, maples, chestnuts, cedars 
of various kinds; there were buttercups, blue 



246 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

harebells, life everlasting, and many dainty- 
wild flowers new and strange to me; I saw 
fields of hay so nearly perpendicular that I 
am sure the farmer must have used telegraph 
climbing irons when cutting the crop. The 
haystacks were stuck on to the hillsides with 
gigantic hatpins to keep them from sliding 
down; and an Italian told me he had seen a 
cow which slipped and rolled out of the farm 
into the gorge below and became mincemeat 
at once. Nevertheless, these mountain sides 
can be and will be lumbered and farmed. Thf 
roads are now there to make development pos^ 
sible; war leaves some good things in its 
wake. 

Yonder is the bald face of Monte Nero, or 
the black mountain, overlooking Tolmino, 
lying in the valley at its foot. The Austrians 
still hold Tolmino, and we can look straight 
down into it from above; but they no longer 
hold Monte Nero. It seemed impossible that 
the Italians would ever try to scale it; but 
one night a battalion of Alpini, climbing all 
the night, the last few hundred yards bare- 
footed, came at dawn upon the Austrian 
trenches, lightly and sleepily held ; and the gar- 
rison surrendered at discretion. It was a feat 
more unimaginable than anything Wolfe ever 
dreamed of at Quebec. I stood and gazed 
at that black mountain, while they told me the 



The Indefatigable Italian 247 

tale, and felt like the farmer looking at the 
camel and saying incredulously: "There ain't 
any such thing." 

We rode into Canale, all shot to pieces, but 
still the semblance of a beautiful mountain 
city, forever ice bathed by the blue Isonzo. 
We crossed on the very pontoon bridge thrown 
across under machine gun fire by the indomit- 
able Italians. We saw the ford, lower down, 
which was too gun-swept to attempt; and we 
saw the lower pontoon bridge, the first that 
the conquering army succeeded in getting 
across. This spot was well guarded >vith 
Austrian machine guns; and at first it seemed 
impossible ever to put a bridge over, but a 
young colonel of engineers, who had been 
manager of a porcelain factory in Milan be- 
fore the war, thought out a way. One night 
he massed his searchlights in the side of a 
cliff overlooking the Isonzo, and focused them 
all night upon the Austrian machine gun posi- 
tions. The gunners were blinded by the glare, 
and the Italian engineers — geriii, they are 
aptly termed, in their own language — slid their 
pontoons down into the river and built their 
bridge; while the Alpini did the rest. 

We scaled the face of the Carso, winding 
back and forth on the new roads; and, reach- 
ing the summit of the cliff, looked away over 
the great plateau to where Italian shells were 



MS Facing the Hindenburg Line 

bursting black in the front lines of the enemy. 
The face of this cliff was stormed eleven times 
by the persevering infantry of Italy before a 
foothold was finally achieved. One particu- 
larly sheer precipice of rock I noted, which 
to me looked impregnable; but the Austrians 
had been driven away from it, for they showed 
me a little gash at last, running up through 
scrub cedar and oak, where the climbers had 
wound their way by night to fall at dawn upon 
the Austrian flank. Italy certainly deserves 
every foot she has gained, for she has done it 
at an immense cost of sweat and blood. 

Then we went to the seashore and saw the 
ship that had been taken by cavalry. True, 
she never had been launched, but she was 
really a ship, the only ship in history captured 
by a troop of horse. She lay in the dry-dock 
where she had been built and was just ready 
for her wedding with the sea. Now she is 
like a bride dead on her marriage morning, 
her veil yellowing around her. She is a mass 
of rusty iron, even yet beaten at times by spite- 
ful shells. 

We looked down into Trieste, on a perfectly 
clear, cloudless day, and saw the city, the 
Italian objective, lying fair in the afternoon 
sun; while, between us and her, frowned 
Hermada. That doughty fortress was receiv- 
ing blows on the head even then. More blows 



The Indefatigable Italian 249 

will rain upon it. Italy has men enough. If 
only the rest of us could fill those men's hands 
with guns and munitions, she could smash her 
way through to Vienna and cut the central 
Confederacy in two. Why it is not done is 
beyond me. Nobody visits this front who 
does not see that here is the place to strike a 
blow below the belt at Pan-Germanism. Here 
is the middle of that broad zone which Ger- 
many hoped to stretch from the North Sea to 
the Persian Gulf. Cut it in two at this, its 
most vulnerable spot, and Pan-Germanism 
falls like a house of baby blocks. Says one, 
this mountain fighting is impossible for any 
but Alpini; and there are only a few regiments 
of these, Italian and Hungarian. But Italy 
has already fought her way out of the moun- 
tains. She is already on the Carso, which is 
open plateau. Says another: Transportation 
is the difficulty. The powers would pour in 
supplies if they could get them there. Well, 
they got them somehow to the Dardanelles. 
Italians have already overcome difficulties of 
transportation, beside which the difficulty of 
our supplying her pales into nothing. 

Says still another, Italy does not wish to go 
to Vienna. She aims at Trieste, and nothing 
more. Besides, the other powers are jealous 
of Italy. They cannot unite upon a campaign 
on this front. Now you are entering upon the 



250 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

secret domain of high international politics 
and intrigue, which has been the curse of the 
world, and where I cannot follow you. For 
myself, it looks to me as if the time and the 
place are ripe for a bit of Uncle Sam's shirt 
sleeve diplomacy; it even appears to me that, 
having no ax to grind, no private ends to 
serve, one of the most valuable functions our 
nation can fulfill, without assumption or im- 
modesty on our part, is to attempt some uni- 
fication in the plans of the Allies, some 
mitigation of international jealousies. Our 
first move should be to declare war on Austria, 
then, with Italy and England, the rest might 
be arranged. Still, all this is not in the 
province of the reporter; and I beg every- 
boy's pardon, especially that of the high 
diplomats. 

Let us go back to reporting. We pause in 
front of a field hospital. It is under a cliff, 
within easy shell reach of the enemy. Indeed, 
it is frequently shelled; and they show us how 
they have hollowed out a hospital in the rock, 
behind this one, to which, upon need, they 
can move. At present it is unoccupied, these 
galleries in the living rock, the stony heart of 
Mother Nature; but they are ready, provided 
with beds, and even electric lights, ready to 
receive the refugees who already hang between 
life and death. I pass into the ward. Only 



The Indefatigable Italian 251 

the worst cases are retained at this advanced 
post, those who must be operated on at once, 
to save life. They are the stillest and the 
sickest looking bunch of men I ever saw. 
Some look dead. Some are dead. Yonder in 
the corner lies one with the sheet pulled over 
his head. He was an Austrian prisoner, but 
they did all for him that they would have 
done for an Italian. There is a dead soldier 
of Italy in the middle of the room. He has 
just died, but the others are all too ill to pay 
any heed. Some lie with open mouth and 
half-open eyes; flies crawl over their lips and 
faces and even between their parched lips. 
Yonder is one just off the table, a bloody 
bandage about his head. An orderly slaps 
him, not very gently, upon the cheek to 
awaken him, but he will not awaken. He 
mutters thickly and drowses on. I don't know 
why they should disturb him, but I suppose 
it is wise; chloroform is used here, and per- 
haps that is the reason they disturb him; or 
perhaps these brain cases need this method of 
procedure. 

The worst of the cases here, however, are 
abdominal. There is a man shot through the 
intestines, operated upon three days ago, and 
doing well. He smiles, in a sickly way, as we 
approach him, and tries to nod his head. Evi- 
dently his fever is still high. There is another 



252 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

from whom a yard and a half of intestine 
was cut away twelve days ago. He will get 
well, and he knows it; you can tell by the sort 
of pathetic triumph in his eye; but he is too 
weak to speak; his smile, however, is a bit 
more assured. We go out into the air. I was 
more depressed than ever before in a hospital 
ward. 

We pass into the operating room. The 
black-bearded surgeon is scrubbing his hands 
with yellow soap and iodine. He comes to the 
door to meet us, and smiles most affably. 
How I love these Italians! He cannot shake 
hands. He cannot talk English ; but no matter. 
A great man's heart shines in his eyes. On 
the table lies a soldier, just brought in. He 
was shot within the hour, with a rifle. The 
ball went through his abdomen, and out at the 
back. He lies there, and I see the clean 
round wound. He is making no moan; but 
his stomach rises and falls with suppressed 
excitement and quick breathing. The surgeon 
covers his own face with his gauze mask, and 
his assistant places the chloroform mask over 
the patient's face. I should like to pause and 
watch the operation; but they call me away 
to look at the X-ray machine, the sterilizing 
apparatus and the other up-to-date appoint- 
ments. 

I learn that about thirty-five per cent of 



The Indefatigable Italian 253 

these abdominal cases are now saved by this 
surgeon. I have heard of forty per cent saved 
by the British; and one French surgeon claims 
to save fifty. It is difficult, however, to con- 
vince me that any of them can outdo these 
Italians. I hear that this surgeon is dissatis- 
fied with his ward, wants things more beautiful 
and bright. I learn, also, that the Frenchman 
who claims fifty per cent drapes the walls of 
his ward in red, puts flowers about and 
Japanese lanterns, and insists on smiles, 
laughter and jests from all his attendants, de- 
claring that half the battle is fought in the 
emotions. Is he not right ? 

Under this same hill, cheek by jowl with 
this Italian post, is a British Red Cross station. 
They are unloading an ambulance at its door 
now. Two, three, four patients are carried in. 
The last one is holding his shattered, ban- 
daged, bloody leg up off the stretcher with 
his own hands, bending upward with head and 
shoulders as he does it. God, what pain he 
is in! But only his face betrays it, no moan. 
I am somewhat benumbed with sights of 
blood and wounds; I have seen so much of 
it, through the months, but my latent emo- 
tions are stirred at the sight of these English- 
men here. Unfit, for one reason or another, 
to bear arms in their own trenches, they came 



254 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

way off here into distant mountains to lend a 
hand to brothers in arms. 

What is the strange chemical quality of this 
English blood that it drives men out from 
home and native land, away from love and 
hedge row, park and country house, to the 
ends of all the earth in peace and war? They 
go to farm and colonize, to lead the backward 
nations, to build and mine, to explore, to 
fight, to hunt, to roam. This queer chemical, 
it seems to me, is destiny, the power of empire 
building, the genius of the management of 
men. It is a thing not understood by the 
Teuton, not possessed by the Gaul, wholly 
bafHing and strange to the Latin. It is the 
lonely, heroic quality of the pioneer, that set- 
tied and subdued our own country, that opened 
Africa, that leads jeweled India docilely by 
the necklace, that holds the Nile in the soft, 
strong hand of a dominion of which the 
Egyptian is scarcely aware. I stand and gaze 
at these English stretcher bearers, and say to 
myself : "Hello, brothers ! After all, none of 
these other races are quite like you. We are 
sprung from the same stock, you and my 
country. I understand the strange compulsion 
that brings you here. A thousand years of 
health to you and yours! A thousand years 
of brotherhood between yours and mine!" 



The Indefatigable Italian ^55 

ENVOY 

There are certain things that it is well to 
keep in mind in these war times. Our philoso- 
phy must not come tumbling down about our 
ears. 

No one of us but would rather go out into 
France and risk his life, or lose it, than to have 
his boy do so. This is true of any father who 
is a real father; and if it is true of an earthly 
father in his feeling toward his son is it not 
doubly true of our heavenly Father in his love 
for his children ? Let nothing persuade us that 
God is a cruel, heartless, or even indifferent 
God just because there is a war on in the 
world — or pestilence, or famine. 

There would have been just as much suffer- 
ing without this war as with it, there would 
have been just as many deaths for as Shake- 
speare said: 

"All that live must die 
Passing through nature to eternity." 

There would have been just as many widows, 
just as many orphans; there would have been 
just as much physical pain — I rather think 
more — only it would have stretched over a 
longer period of time, twenty or thirty years 
instead of being condensed into four or five 
or six short ones. 

This does not solve the problem of evil. We 
shall never solve it until we pass behind the 



^56 Facing the Hindenburg Line 

veil and see eye to eye and face to face. God 
could have made a perfect world, an Eden of a 
world, with nothing in it but innocent flowers 
and song birds and innocent Adams and Eves 
who wouldn't know the difference between 
right and wrong; but he could not have made 
that kind of world and at the same time given 
you and me the right to choose, to shape our 
conduct for ourselves. And as for me, I 
wouldn't care to be an innocent little flower or 
bird or Adam or Eve with no sense of responsi- 
bility and no freedom of choice. I would 
rather be a man, shape my conduct for myself, 
make mistakes, sin, fall, hurt myself and cry, 
and then get up and go on to struggle, to fight, 
and to win out in some sort of battle. I 
wouldn't be an innocent. 

This does not solve the problem of evil, we 
shall never solve it until we pass over to the 
other side ; but be assured that behind the war- 
clouds which lower so heavily over us, and will 
grow heavier before we are through, sits God 
within the shadow keeping watch above his 
own. And there is not a mother's heart torn 
and bleeding for her boy, not a father the 
chambers of whose soul are empty, echoing, 
yearning and void, there is not a soldier who 
falls like a sparrow to the ground, without our 
heavenly Father. 

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